What it costs to live in Ann Arbor as a UMich student, line by line

Rent is the biggest line and the only one with a live number behind it. Wroomly publishes median asking rents for active sublets, and they move, so read them on the day you budget. These were read on 2026-11-04 from Wroomly's own rent page, which covered 152 active listings that day.

A median asking rent is the price on the listing for the whole place, not your share of it. If the place has three bedrooms and three people, you will divide it yourself.

Rent is the start, not the total. The university describes cost of attendance as a set of estimated student budgets: tuition and fees, living expenses for housing and food, books and course materials, transportation, and miscellaneous personal expenses such as phone bills and student insurance. Use those same categories as the skeleton of your own sheet.

Every category below is one you fill in yourself, because the right number depends on your lease, your kitchen and your week. This guide prints no figure for them. Open the university's cost of attendance page to compare your totals against its categories, and treat its estimates as a yardstick, not as your bill.

Three things change: the divisor, the length, and what is included.

The divisor first. Take the median for your bedroom count and divide it by the people on the lease, then check the listing to see if rooms are priced separately. The listing, not the median, is what you will actually pay.

Length next. A sublet runs for the months the poster is away, often shorter than a twelve month lease, so multiply by the months you hold the place, not by twelve. A furnished sublet also saves the one time cost of buying a desk and a bed.

Then what is included. Some sublets bundle utilities or internet into rent, others do not. Ask, and write the answer in your sheet beside the line it replaces. Wroomly's guide on how to price a sublet covers how posters decide what to include.

The ones that do not arrive monthly. Put them in the sheet anyway and divide by the months you will live there.

Copy the table below into a spreadsheet. The housing lines already carry a figure and a source. Every other line is blank on purpose: type your number, and type where it came from in the last column. A line with no source is a guess, so either find one or mark it as a guess.

Then do the sum in three passes. First, rent for the place you are actually looking at, divided by the people on the lease. Second, the monthly lines you filled in. Third, the one time costs, spread across the months you will stay. Compare the result with the university's cost of attendance categories, and adjust the lines that look off.

Once you have a ceiling per month, filter by it. Browse current sublets on Wroomly's listings, check each one against your sheet, and look at neighborhood pages for walk time and transit before you decide that a cheaper place is cheaper overall. Verified UMich students carry a blue check on Wroomly, which shows a verified student and nothing more, so check every listing as you would any other.