Housing Cost Squeeze Recasts BNPL as a Liquidity Tool

Rent doesn’t wait for payday.

As shelter costs continue to climb and consume a larger share of household budgets, consumers are looking for ways to better align fixed monthly obligations with the timing of their income.

The latest Consumer Price Index data, released Wednesday (June 10), underscored the pressure. Shelter prices rose 3.4% over the past year, while food at home increased 2.7% and food away from home climbed 3.5%. For many households, these expenses cannot easily be deferred, making liquidity as important as affordability.

That backdrop illuminates how and where buy now, pay later (BNPL) is steadily moving beyond the checkout page.

As 2026 dawned, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote that BNPL’s “next act is not about helping Gen Z buy more sneakers. It is about becoming the everyday liquidity tool consumers use to keep the lights on, the pantry stocked and the bills current.” The latest market developments suggest providers are capitalizing on these opportunities, particularly when it comes to keeping the roof over our collective heads.

From Shopping Tool to Budgeting Tool

This year, Affirm and Esusu, a FinTech company, partnered to allow eligible renters to split monthly rent payments. A report this week said housing pressures are leading other companies to offer these “rent now, pay later” loans, formalizing a consumer behavior that PYMNTS data suggests has been developing for some time.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in the May Pay Later Ecosystem Report several trends that challenge long-held assumptions about BNPL users. Households earning more than $150,000 use BNPL at roughly twice the rate of households earning less than $50,000, indicating that payment flexibility appeals beyond consumers who lack access to traditional credit.

Meanwhile, credit card installments outpaced BNPL by more than 2-to-1 across eight consecutive waves of tracking, per the report, showing that consumers increasingly value installment structures regardless of who provides them.

The behavior surrounding BNPL reinforces that interpretation. PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The Adjustable-Rate Reckoning: How Homeownership Is Pushing Millions Paycheck to Paycheck” found that 41% of BNPL users also reduced discretionary spending, suggesting many consumers incorporate installment products into broader budgeting decisions rather than using them to spend beyond their means.

Rising housing, food and service costs are forcing households to make increasingly careful decisions about when money leaves their accounts. In that context, the ability to split a large recurring obligation can function less like additional borrowing and more like cash flow management. Since many people run their households the way they would run a business, like tracking money in, money out and the margins, so to speak, BNPL offers a working capital buffer for stretched users.

The Rent Test

Rent represents the clearest example of the shift because it is often the largest payment households make every month.

Giving renters the ability to divide that obligation into smaller installments does not reduce the amount they owe, but it can reduce the mismatch between fixed due dates and variable income schedules. For workers paid biweekly, gig workers with fluctuating earnings or households juggling multiple obligations, timing itself becomes a financial variable.

The digital preference is well established, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Money Mobility Tracker®: From Rent to Refunds: The Push for Faster Payments in Property Management.” Tenants who pay rent online report a higher satisfaction rate than those who don’t. Having the pay-over-time option available at one’s online convenience would set the stage for broader adoption.

However, the surveys PYMNTS Intelligence has conducted into the Pay Later ecosystem also suggest providers should recognize that recurring obligations are different from discretionary purchases. According to the May report, consumers using BNPL for recurring everyday expenses reported paying at least one installment late 76% of the time, compared with 43% among those using BNPL only for one-time purchases.

If installment plans become another tool for managing timing around recurring bills, providers will need underwriting and repayment models that recognize the different cadence of those obligations rather than treating them like traditional point-of-sale financing.

The latest rent offerings suggest the market is responding to a broader economic reality. Housing costs are becoming harder to fit neatly within the paycheck cycle. BNPL’s status as a modern liquidity tool continues to evolve.