Ask three people in Tbilisi what a one-bedroom flat costs and you will get three confident answers that do not agree, and none of them will be wrong. They will be describing different districts, different months, different furnishing and different degrees of formality about the paperwork. That is not a failure of the people answering. It reflects something structural about the Georgian rental market that is worth understanding before you start viewing anything.
What follows deliberately does not put a monthly figure on a flat in any city, and you should be sceptical of any article that does. What it does instead is set out the parts of the total that you can establish for yourself, the way the four largest cities differ in ways that move the price, and the two checks that decide whether the arrangement you are entering is a lease or a handshake.
Moving is also expensive at exactly the moment when income is least flexible. Which is where something like I am Beezy earns its place: it credits you for the videos, articles and adverts you look at, so part of the moving week can be put aside over the preceding weeks rather than borrowed in the same one.
Why can nobody tell you the average rent in Georgia?
Because the number does not exist in any public source. That is a genuine fact about the country rather than a gap in your research, and knowing it changes how you shop.
There is no official rent series
No Georgian public body publishes a reference rent, and no cadastral or statistical source establishes one. What that means practically is that you have no benchmark to hold a landlord against, so the comparison has to come from your own viewings. See more properties than feels necessary before agreeing to anything: in a market with no published reference, the fifth viewing is what tells you whether the first was reasonable.
Listing portals are a marketplace, not a statistic
MyHome, SS.ge and Livo are where the Georgian rental market actually happens, and they are the right places to look. They are not the right places to quote. An average computed from asking prices on a portal reflects what landlords hope for and what has not yet been let, which is systematically different from what people pay. Use them to find flats and to see what is competing with each other, then negotiate on what you have seen.
What the statistics office does publish
One official indicator is genuinely useful. In the consumer price index basket for 2026, actual rentals for housing carry a weight of 2.64%, against 0.90% in 2012 — the share of a Georgian household budget going to rent has close to tripled in fifteen years. Housing, water, electricity and gas together weigh 9.68%, of which electricity, gas and fuels account for 4.98%. Food and non-alcoholic drinks dominate the basket at 33.58%. These are weights describing the structure of household spending, not amounts, so they tell you where the money goes rather than how much any of it costs.
Four cities, four different rental markets
Georgia is not one housing market with regional discounts. The four largest cities are driven by genuinely different forces, and the same salary buys a different life in each.
Tbilisi absorbs a third of the country
The capital counted 1,369,356 residents on 1 January 2026, which is 34.7% of the national population and 5.6 times the second city. Everything institutional is there: the National Bank, the Revenue Service, the statistics office. Demand for housing in a city of that weight is not seasonal and does not soften much, and the practical consequence is that your negotiating room in Tbilisi comes from location and timing rather than from scarcity of tenants.
Batumi runs on a season
Batumi, capital of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara and the country's only large seaside city and port, counted 246,267 residents on 1 January 2026. Between May and October the short-term letting market competes directly with long leases for the same flats, which is a dynamic Tbilisi does not have. If you are signing a twelve-month lease in Batumi, the month you sign in matters: a landlord's alternative use of the property in July is not the alternative they have in February.
Kutaisi and Rustavi pull in opposite directions
Kutaisi, capital of Imereti and seat of the Parliament of Georgia, counted 153,799 residents on 1 January 2026, down from 160,095 a year earlier — the only large Georgian city to have contracted over that year. Rustavi, 130,205 residents, is an industrial city in Kvemo Kartli around 25 kilometres from Tbilisi. Those two facts describe two very different propositions: a second city where the tenant has more room, and a satellite where the trade-off is between the rent and the commute.
| City | Residents at 1 January 2026 | What drives the local market |
|---|---|---|
| Tbilisi | 1,369,356 | 34.7% of the country; institutions, year-round demand |
| Batumi | 246,267 | Adjara capital, port and coast; May to October season |
| Kutaisi | 153,799 | Imereti capital and seat of Parliament; contracting population |
| Rustavi | 130,205 | Industry in Kvemo Kartli, about 25 km from Tbilisi |
| Gori | 49,425 in the city, 120,100 in the municipality | Shida Kartli, on the Tbilisi to west road axis |
| Zugdidi | 45,691 in the city, 98,305 in the municipality | Samegrelo and Zemo Svaneti, western regional centre |
What is in the total that is not in the advert?
Four items, and together they routinely change which of two flats is actually cheaper. Build them into the comparison before you fall in love with a kitchen.
The deposit and whoever introduced you
A deposit takes cash out of your account at the same moment as the first month and the move itself, so the real question is not its size but whether you can cover all three at once. Establish in writing what it secures, what can be deducted from it and when it comes back. If an agent is involved, establish who pays them and how much, before viewing rather than after choosing.
Utilities you cannot look up in advance
There is no public tariff comparison you can consult to sanity-check what a flat will cost to run, so the only reliable method is documentary: ask to see recent bills for the actual property, not an estimate. A flat that is cheap to rent and expensive to heat is a common trade in any market with older housing stock, and the bills are the only place that shows up. Remember that electricity, gas and fuels sit at 4.98% of the national basket while rent sits at 2.64% — running a home is not a rounding error next to renting it.
The commute is part of the rent
In Tbilisi this is unusually easy to price, because the municipal operator publishes its fares. Read on ttc.com.ge on 16 August 2026, the base fare is 1 GEL for 90 minutes of unlimited travel when paid with a Metromoney card or a bank card, with unlimited passes at 3 GEL for a day, 20 GEL for a week, 40 GEL for a month and 250 GEL for a year, sold on a season card. The operator states that a passenger paying through the mobile application or in cash does not get the 90-minute unlimited package, which is worth knowing before you assume the app is equivalent. A monthly pass is a known, fixed number, so in Tbilisi a flat two stops further out is straightforwardly comparable. In a city without a metro that arithmetic does not transfer.
| Cost line | How to establish it before signing | Why it changes the ranking |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly rent | Five or more viewings in the same district | No published reference exists to compare against |
| Deposit | Written terms on deductions and return | Lands in the same week as the move |
| Agency fee | Agreed before viewing, in writing | Can equal a large part of a month |
| Utilities | Recent bills for that property | No public tariff comparison to check against |
| Transport | Published municipal fares where they exist | Turns distance into a fixed monthly figure |
| Furnishing | Written inventory at handover | Decides what the deposit can be charged for |
Covering a move with I am Beezy
Deposit, first month, agency and the move itself all arrive together, which is why people borrow for a move they could otherwise afford. On I am Beezy the unit of value is the view: each video, article or advertisement you consult adds to a balance, and that balance goes out through your usual payment method, in practice a Georgian bank account.
The range, converted into lari
The platform reference across the corpus is 5 to 15 euros a day. Using the National Bank of Georgia's indicative rate published for 6 August 2026, where one euro bought 3.0260 lari, that lands at roughly 15 to 45 GEL a day. The National Bank calls the rate indicative rather than binding and the lari floats, so recalculate on the day it matters.
Setting it against what a salary looks like
To size any of this properly, note that average monthly nominal pay in Georgia was 2,282.7 GEL for 2025 while the median was 1,332 GEL for 2024 — different years, published on different schedules, and not directly comparable, but the gap between them is the point. Housing decisions taken against the average will not fit the household earning the median, which is more than half of them.
How do you check the landlord and the lease before paying?
Pull an extract from the public register
The National Agency of Public Registry, under the Ministry of Justice, keeps the real estate registry and a register of restrictions, liens and leases, and issues extracts from the public register. An extract tells you who the registered owner is and whether the property carries a charge or an existing lease. Doing that before the deposit leaves your account is the single highest-value step in this entire article, and it is the one almost nobody takes.
The landlord's tax position is 5%, and that works in your favour
Article 81.2 of the Tax Code taxes an individual's income from letting a residential property at 5%, where the property is let for residential use and the owner claims no deductions against that income. Annex 5 of Government Decree 415 further places rental income outside the special small business regime and outside its turnover ceiling. A landlord who declares a residential letting is therefore looking at a modest rate rather than the general 20%, which removes most of the fiscal argument for keeping an arrangement off the books. That is a reasonable and non-confrontational thing to raise when asking for a written lease.
Put it in writing, because no European rule fills the gaps
Georgia is a candidate for European Union membership and is not a member, so no EU tenancy or consumer directive applies here of its own force. Whatever the two of you have not written down is not supplied by anything else. Record the rent, the deposit terms, the notice period, who pays which utility, the inventory and the condition of the property at handover, with photographs. For dealings with a business rather than a private landlord, the Georgian Competition and Consumer Agency runs a consumer hotline on 1520.
Compare the total, not the headline
The flat that wins on the advert regularly loses on the total, and in Georgia you have no published average to catch that for you. Do the work in this order: see enough properties to build your own reference, price the deposit and the agency alongside the rent, get recent bills for the actual property, convert the commute into a monthly figure where the fares are published, and pull a registry extract before any money moves. And if the obstacle is the week when all of it falls due at once, I am Beezy is a way to have part of it already put aside.
