Most lists of the best Chicago suburbs for young professionals recommend Naperville, Elmhurst and Downers Grove. Those are three of the four worst towns on this page if you are renting, which at 27 you almost certainly are.
The lists are written for buyers. Elmhurst has 3,375 renter households in the entire city and the highest median rent of any suburb here. Forest Park, which appears on nobody's list, has the highest concentration of 25-to-34-year-olds in the group and a train that runs at four in the morning.
Everything below comes from the Census Bureau's 2024 five-year estimates, Metra's own schedule feed generated July 16, 2026, and Metra's published fare table, checked July 30, 2026.
Which Suburb Is Right for You?
- You want the cheapest rent and don't mind driving to dinner: Berwyn, $1,215 median gross rent, 21 minutes to Union Station.
- You go out late and want to get home without a car: Forest Park or Oak Park, both on the Blue Line, which never stops. Everywhere else here the last Metra leaves downtown by 12:40 a.m. Evanston keeps running a while past that on the Purple Line, but it shuts down overnight too.
- You want the most peers: Evanston has 9,668 residents aged 25 to 34, more than any suburb here except Naperville, in a town half Naperville's size.
- You want the shortest commute: Oak Park, 18 minutes on the fastest morning express, in the cheapest fare zone.
- You're moving as a couple: the rent math changes and the commute math replaces it. Skip to the couples section.
- You are buying, not renting: then the usual lists are fine, and you want the western suburbs ranked by the train instead.
Who Lives There
Before rent or commute times, ask whether the town has apartments and whether anyone your age lives in them. Two towns can both be "great for young professionals" and differ by a factor of four on both counts.
| Town | Aged 25–34 | Share of pop. | Renter households | Share renting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forest Park | 2,045 | 14.7% | 3,342 | 47.2% |
| Berwyn | 7,618 | 13.7% | 7,972 | 38.9% |
| Evanston | 9,668 | 12.7% | 13,898 | 43.8% |
| Oak Park | 6,245 | 11.7% | 9,350 | 40.0% |
| Downers Grove | 5,759 | 11.5% | 5,114 | 24.8% |
| Arlington Heights | 8,469 | 11.1% | 8,178 | 26.0% |
| Naperville | 16,604 | 11.0% | 13,827 | 25.2% |
| Skokie | 6,371 | 9.6% | 6,173 | 25.3% |
| Elmhurst | 4,112 | 9.0% | 3,375 | 20.1% |
| La Grange | 1,126 | 7.0% | 1,076 | 18.5% |
La Grange has 1,076 rental households. Not units advertised, not vacancies — the total number of households in the village that rent. It is a lovely town with a 24-minute express, and if you are looking for an apartment there you are competing for a rounding error.
Elmhurst is the head-scratcher. It has the second-lowest share of 25-to-34-year-olds here and the highest median rent on the page, and it is a standing fixture on these lists. What those lists rank is the downtown, the schools and the home values. None of the three is the thing you are renting.
What You'll Pay
Median gross rent includes utilities the tenant pays, so it is the number you'll pay, not the number in the listing. Margins of error are the Census Bureau's own.
| Town | Median gross rent | ± | 1-bedroom | 2-bedroom | Median household income |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berwyn | $1,215 | $56 | $992 | $1,324 | $78,408 |
| Forest Park | $1,367 | $82 | $1,113 | $1,476 | $77,221 |
| Skokie | $1,552 | $81 | $1,266 | $1,606 | $95,337 |
| Oak Park | $1,593 | $81 | $1,383 | $1,919 | $110,820 |
| Downers Grove | $1,656 | $81 | $1,366 | $1,799 | $115,114 |
| Arlington Heights | $1,760 | $44 | $1,578 | $1,816 | $116,723 |
| Evanston | $1,762 | $46 | $1,525 | $1,835 | $96,434 |
| La Grange | $1,856 | $154 | $1,313 | $1,754 | $159,929 |
| Naperville | $1,885 | $39 | $1,643 | $1,935 | $155,105 |
| Elmhurst | $1,975 | $142 | $1,538 | $1,934 | $149,644 |
The spread from Berwyn to Elmhurst is $760 a month — about $9,100 a year, which is a used car or most of a down payment, depending on your temperament.
Note what the rent does not track. Berwyn and Forest Park have nearly identical median household incomes, around $77,000, and Oak Park sits $33,000 above both while renting for only about $200 more. Rent here follows the housing stock (how much of it is two-flats and courtyard buildings versus single-family) more closely than it follows local affluence.
Oak Park is the odd one in the bedroom columns. Its studios are the second cheapest here at $1,210, and its two-bedrooms are the third most expensive at $1,919 — a wider gap between the two than any other town. That is a stock quirk, not a market signal: Oak Park has a lot of small units in courtyard buildings and comparatively few large ones.
If You're Moving as a Couple
Same towns, different arithmetic, and the search term shifts far enough that it is worth saying plainly: split a two-bedroom and the per-person number beats a one-bedroom nearly everywhere.
Half of a two-bedroom in Naperville, the second most expensive town here, runs $968 a person. A one-bedroom in Berwyn, the cheapest town here, is $992. Two people can live in the priciest suburb on this page for less each than one person pays in the cheapest.
That inverts the ranking above in one specific way. If you are a couple, the rent column stops being the binding constraint and the commute becomes it, because you now likely have two of them going to two places. That argues for the towns with more than one line: Oak Park (UP-W, Green, Blue) and Evanston (UP-N, Purple) are the only two here where each of you can have a different train.
What does not change: the last train, the rental stock, and whether anyone your age lives there.
Getting Downtown
Weekday trains arriving at Union Station or Ogilvie between 7:00 and 9:30 a.m., showing the fastest and slowest from the same platform, plus how many trains you have to choose from.
| Station | Line | Zone | Fastest | Slowest peak | AM peak trains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oak Park | UP-W | 2 | 18 min | 23 min | 9 |
| Berwyn | BNSF | 2 | 21 min | 23 min | 4 |
| Harlem Ave. | BNSF | 2 | 23 min | 25 min | 4 |*
| La Grange Rd. | BNSF | 3 | 24 min | 37 min | 6 |
| Riverside | BNSF | 2 | 26 min | 28 min | 4 |
| Elmhurst | UP-W | 3 | 27 min | 40 min | 10 |
| Evanston (Davis) | UP-N | 2 | 29 min | 30 min | 10 |
| Downers Grove | BNSF | 4 | 30 min | 59 min | 10 |
| Arlington Heights | UP-NW | 3 | 36 min | 54 min | 9 |
| Naperville | BNSF | 4 | 39 min | 71 min | 10 |
\* Harlem Avenue's grade crossing is closed for BNSF track work, to pedestrians as well as cars. It was due back August 16 and has slipped to a tentative Wednesday, August 19. The village is directing riders to Berwyn or Riverside, which sit in the same fare zone, so you pay the same either way.
Read the last two columns together. Berwyn's spread is two minutes and it has four trains; Naperville's is thirty-two minutes and it has ten. A tight spread means the schedule is honest with you. A wide one means the express in the listing is not the train you will be on.
Oak Park is the outlier in the right direction: fastest time on the page, nine trains, and the cheapest fare zone. Evanston is slower than its reputation at 29 minutes, but it is the steadiest number here — a one-minute spread across ten trains.
The fares
Zone 1–2 covers Oak Park, Berwyn, Harlem Ave., Riverside and Evanston: $3.75 one way, $75 a month. Zone 1–3 covers La Grange, Elmhurst and Arlington Heights at $5.50 and $110. Zone 1–4 covers Downers Grove and Naperville at $6.75 and $135.
Easy to miss: a Regional Connect Pass is $30 a month on top of a Metra Monthly Pass and covers unlimited CTA and Pace. From a Zone 2 town that is $105 a month for the train downtown plus every bus and L in the city. It has to be bought in the Ventra app alongside the monthly pass.
Takeaway: rent and commute both point the same direction here, and it is not the direction the standard lists point. The Zone 2 towns are the fastest to leave and, Evanston aside, the cheapest to live in.
Getting Home Is the Part That Decides It
Metra's last train out of downtown leaves between 12:30 and 12:40 a.m., and it does that seven nights a week.
| Town | Last departure downtown | Gets you home |
|---|---|---|
| Oak Park (UP-W) | 12:40 a.m. | 12:56 a.m. |
| Elmhurst | 12:40 a.m. | 1:14 a.m. |
| Arlington Heights | 12:35 a.m. | 1:21 a.m. |
| Berwyn | 12:33 a.m. | 12:53 a.m. |
| La Grange Rd. | 12:33 a.m. | 1:04 a.m. |
| Downers Grove | 12:33 a.m. | 1:23 a.m. |
| Naperville | 12:33 a.m. | 1:35 a.m. |
| Evanston (Davis) | 12:32 a.m. | 12:58 a.m. |
Saturday and Sunday are the same. There is no late-night allowance for the weekend on any of these lines. The last Saturday train is either identical to the last Tuesday train or within five minutes of it.
So if you live in a Metra-only town, every evening downtown ends at half past midnight, walking to the station. Miss it and you are paying for a ride from the Loop to DuPage County at one in the morning.
The Blue Line runs 24 hours. Forest Park is its western terminal, and it passes through Oak Park. So does the Red Line, 24 hours, if you are coming from the North Side. For a young professional who goes out on weeknights, which is most of the reason people ask this question, that single fact reorders the entire list.
Evanston does not have this. Purple Line service at Davis stops overnight: last departure 1:46 a.m., nothing again until 4:41 a.m. Evanston's last Metra leaves Ogilvie at 12:32 a.m. Evanston is a genuine transit town that closes at night.
The Four That Work
Forest Park
$1,367 rent · 47.2% renters · 14.7% aged 25–34 · Blue Line, 24 hours
The highest share of people your age of any suburb here, in the smallest town here — 13,943 people. Almost half of all households rent, which is the highest ratio on the page and the reason there is anything to rent at all.
It is the Blue Line's western terminal, so you get a seat, and the train runs all night. Madison Street is the bar and restaurant strip and it is walkable end to end.
What's thin about it: it is small, and small means thin. One main commercial street, and if you don't like it there is no second one. The Blue Line's Forest Park branch is being rebuilt in phases, and the finished piece is the small one. A $268 million first phase rebuilt about three miles of track between LaSalle and the Illinois Medical District, and full service there came back in 2023. The branch runs more than thirteen miles. As of July, the CTA had more than 84% of it under a slow zone; the rest of phase one, the Racine station rebuild among it, runs toward 2027; and design work on everything after that only begins late this year. Your commute is slower than the map suggests and will be for years, not months.
Berwyn
$1,215 rent · 38.9% renters · 13.7% aged 25–34 · BNSF Zone 2, 21–23 min
The cheapest rent on the page by about $150 a month, and only two minutes separate its fastest peak train from its slowest. Twenty-one minutes to Union Station for $75 a month is the best rent-to-commute trade here.
FitzGerald's at 6615 Roosevelt Road books live music six nights a week, dark Mondays, and went onto the National Register of Historic Places at the end of 2024, listed as The Hunt Club. That kind of listing usually goes to the grand rooms downtown — the Chicago Theatre has had one since 1979 — not to a roadhouse on Roosevelt. Its American Music Festival ran for the 43rd time over July 2–5 this year.
The constraint is frequency: four morning peak trains. If your start time moves, your options don't. Berwyn is also more spread out than Forest Park or Oak Park — the housing is bungalows and two-flats over a wide grid, so "walkable to the station" describes some of Berwyn and not most of it. Walk it before you sign.
Oak Park
$1,593 rent · 40.0% renters · 11.7% aged 25–34 · Green + Blue + UP-W Zone 2, 18–23 min
The best transit position in the suburbs, full stop: an 18-minute Metra express in Zone 2, the Green Line, and the 24-hour Blue Line a mile south. Nine morning trains. Nothing else here has three rail options.
You pay for it in the tax bill, which reaches you through the rent. Oak Park's composite property tax rate runs about 35% higher than Evanston's, roughly $4,100 a year more on an identically valued house, and landlords do not absorb that. It is also the reason Oak Park's rent sits above Berwyn's despite similar building stock. We compared the two towns properly in Evanston vs Oak Park, and the regional version of the same arithmetic is in the suburbs with the lowest property taxes.
Evanston
$1,762 rent · 43.8% renters · 12.7% aged 25–34 · UP-N Zone 2 + Purple Line, 29–30 min
The second-largest population of people your age here after Naperville, in a town half its size, and the most rental housing of anywhere on this page in absolute terms — 13,898 renter households. It is also the only town here that reads as a small city rather than a downtown with a train.
Against that: it is the third most expensive rent here, the commute is 29 minutes rather than the 20 people assume, and it shuts down overnight. If your social life is in Chicago and it runs past midnight, Evanston will cost you rideshare money that Oak Park will not.
What to Check Before You Sign
Walk the route from the apartment to the platform, at night. Every number on this page assumes you are at the station. In Berwyn and Naperville that assumption does a lot of unearned work.
Look up the train you'd take, not the express in the listing. Downers Grove is 30 minutes or 59 depending on which one you board.
If you're driving to the station, price the permit before the lease. Commuter lots in these towns are permit-controlled with waiting lists, and a lease is a year while a permit queue can be longer.
Buy the Regional Connect Pass if you'll use the L more than four times a month. At $30 on top of the Metra monthly it pays for itself quickly, and it is easy to miss because it only exists inside the Ventra app.
Rents move faster than the Census. These are 2024 five-year estimates — the most reliable like-for-like comparison available across towns, and deliberately not a listing-site average, which measures whatever happens to be vacant this week. Use them to rank towns, not to predict your rent.
The Short Version
If you are renting, going out, and not planning to buy in the next two years, the answer is Forest Park or Oak Park, and it is mostly about the Blue Line running at 3 a.m. Berwyn wins if the rent number is the one that matters most.
Naperville, Elmhurst and Downers Grove are good towns that will be excellent when you are buying a house. Right now they are asking you to pay more for a longer commute to a place where fewer people your age live, and the last train still leaves by 12:40.
If you want a shorter list to start from, the four-question suburb quiz sorts on budget, commute, the feel of the place and the lakefront.
This guide is part of The Car-Free Renter's Suburban Starter Pack.