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The statistics East African governments publish, gathered into one register and kept exactly as they were published.

RECORD OF 2026-09-27
216 SERIES IN THE REGISTER 216 SERIES 210 AUTOMATED, 6 CURATED 293,608 OBSERVATIONS 293,608 OBS WIRE LOG →
knbs ke.knbs.housing-tenure.irregular irregular

Households by Tenure Status, County and Residence.

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VERSION v2026-09-07
UPDATED 20d ago
COVERAGE 2023 - 2024
SHAPE 719 × 7
SIZE 8.0 KB
FREQUENCY irregular
PIPELINE automated
LICENSE Not stated
SOURCE www.knbs.or.ke

Whether Kenya's households own the home they live in, rent it, live in it rent-free with the owner's consent or squat, for the country and each of its 47 counties, split by rural and urban residence, from the 2023/24 Kenya Housing and Real Estate Surveys. Each geography and residence carries the four shares and the number of households they are shares of: 13,886,126 households nationally, 8,519,926 rural and 5,366,201 urban.

Kenya is a nation of owners in the countryside and renters in town. 61.3 per cent of households own their home, but that is 85.5 per cent of rural households against 22.8 per cent of urban ones, and 72.3 per cent of urban households pay rent. Only six counties have a renting majority: Nairobi City, where 7.7 per cent of households own and 88.8 per cent rent, then Mombasa at 23.5 per cent owning, Kajiado, Lamu, Kiambu and Uasin Gishu. At the other end Vihiga, West Pokot, Wajir and Bomet are more than 87 per cent owner-occupied. Rent-free occupation with the owner's consent is 4.6 per cent nationally and reaches 19.3 per cent in Lamu; squatting is 0.8 per cent nationally and 14 per cent in Mandera.

Mombasa and Nairobi City are entirely urban. Mombasa prints zero in every rural column and Nairobi City prints zero in three and nothing in the fourth, and the dataset carries exactly that: a printed zero is kept and a blank cell is dropped, because publishing a figure the survey did not state would be inventing one.

This is one survey round rather than a series. It is published under the same rule as the 2019 census: a county matrix from a survey with no announced repeat is a dataset, and if KNBS repeats the survey the next round joins this one on the same key. The survey's household response rate was 92.1 per cent, 94 per cent rural and 89.9 per cent urban. ke.knbs.home-acquisition.irregular, from the same chapter, counts owner households by county; dividing those by this table's households gives an owner share within a tenth of a point of the one printed here in 36 of the 48 geographies and 1.05 points below it in Nyandarua at worst, which is the two tables being weighted separately rather than a defect in either, and neither is adjusted to the other.

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OWNERS IN THE COUNTRY, RENTERS IN TOWN

Six in ten Kenyan households own their home, but in Nairobi City fewer than one in twelve do and 88.8 per cent pay rent.

Share of households that own their dwelling, all areas · per cent · 47 counties, 2023/24 survey

SOURCE: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics · Households by Tenure Status, County and Residence (2023/24 Housing Survey) · Updated 2026-09-07
BOUNDARIES: RCMRD GeoPortal · via geoBoundaries ADM1 · Public Domain
# survey_roundgeographygeography_levelresidenceindicatorvalueunit
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CITATION · APA 7

Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Households by Tenure Status, County and Residence [Data set] (Version 2026-09-07). Distributed by imibare. https://imibare.org/datasets/ke.knbs.housing-tenure.irregular