How to Split Rent with Roommates

Back in University, I’ve always lived with roommates and split the rent evenly. However, rooms differ in size, amenities, sunlight, etc.

For example, I lived in a 5 bedroom apartment in my last semester at Waterloo. All rooms were relatively the same besides one room. That one room was noticeably smaller, had a broken chair, and no closet. It was clearly the inferior room. By default, that room went to our last roommate to move in. We were splitting rent evenly and it was clear that he was getting the short end of the stick.

I’m retrospect, the rent should’ve not been evenly split. But how do we split the rent fairly? This topic of fair division is has been researched and many papers have been published on it. Spliddit, is a tool developed by academics to solve the problem of splitting rent fairly amongst roommates so that every roommate feels like they’re getting a deal.

I’ll spare the details on how it works, but my roommates tried it on our future apartment in Brooklyn and the results look promising.

July 20, 2022


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