Here's the most expensive town for renters in every state

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz/Skye Gould, data from US Census Bureau

Rent varies across the US.

• Using data from the Census Bureau, we found the town in each state with the highest median gross rent for apartments and other rented housing.
• Several of the towns are affluent suburbs and resorts.

How much it costs to rent an apartment varies widely across the United States.

The American Community Survey is an annual survey run by the Census Bureau to allow the government, corporate and academic researchers, and anyone who is curious about demographics to better understand the US population. Among many other subjects, the ACS includes questions about how much people who rent their homes pay each month.

Using the ACS estimates from 2013 to 2017 for places with at least a 1,000-person population, excluding college campuses and military bases, Business Insider made a map showing the town in each state with the highest median gross rent.

Gross rent measures how much renters pay for their housing in total each month, including base rent itself along with utilities and other costs. Since the median gross rent for a place is measured across all rented housing units, places where renting larger properties like detached single-family houses is common may tend to have higher medians than places with smaller units.

Read more: It's more affordable to rent than buy in most US cities

The Census Bureau top-codes median gross rents, which means that for places where that median is above $3,500 per month, it does not give a precise estimate in order to protect the privacy of survey respondents. In five states - California, Maryland, New York, Texas, and Virginia - there were multiple places with populations over 1,000 that fell into the over $3,500 bracket. To break the tie, we chose the town in the over-$3,500 median gross rent bracket with the highest share of renters paying over $3,000 per month.

Here's the most expensive town for renter in every state, listed alphabetically by state along with its population and median gross rent according to the American Community Survey results: