Rust Apartment Complex: Rent Cost, Master Key & Raiding

Updated August 2026

Every Rust player knows the first hour of a wipe. You have a bag of stone, a bow, no bed, and a base plan that dies the moment somebody with a crossbow finds your twig. For eleven years the answer was always the same: build something, and hope.

Then Facepunch put a landlord in the game.

The Rust Apartment Complex is a safe zone monument where you walk up to a receptionist, hand over scrap, and get handed the keys to a room with a bed, a locker, a stove, a phone, a Tier 1 workbench and a lockable front door. Rent starts at 25 scrap up front and 10 scrap a day. Nobody can C4 your door. The only thing that opens it is a 1,000 scrap Apartment Key that some stranger has to buy from the guard in your own basement.

This guide has every verified number: real rent costs for all three tiers, what is actually inside each room, the full shop economics including the takeover multiplier, exactly how a break in works from the guard bribe to the five minute timer, the two things the August 2026 update changed, and the scrap per storage slot maths that shows why the penthouse is the worst deal in the building.

TL;DR The Rust Apartment Complex is a safe zone monument added in the Common Ground update on 2 July 2026. Rent a basement room for 25 scrap plus 10 a day, a standard apartment for 150 plus 50 a day, or a penthouse for 350 plus 100 a day. There are 62 rooms and 14 rentable shops. There is no recycler, no radiation, no scientists and no keycard puzzle. Rooms cannot be raided with explosives at all. The only way in is a 1,000 scrap Apartment Key from the basement security NPC, which breaches one door in 30 seconds and gives the thief 5 minutes inside while you are allowed to shoot back. Miss 24 hours of rent and everything you own is deleted.

What it is
The update
At a glance
Is there a recycler?
Rent cost
Inside the rooms
How to rent
Rentable shops
The Apartment Key
How break ins work
Defending your room
Is it worth it?
Mistakes
FAQ

Rust Apartment Complex monument seen from above, the new safe zone housing monument added in the Common Ground update — The Rust Apartment Complex. Sixty two rooms, fourteen shops, and a landlord who deletes your loot if you are late.

What is the Apartment Complex in Rust?

The Apartment Complex is a safe zone monument built around a single idea: renting instead of building. Facepunch described it as a place for “players getting started with a wipe to find a place to call home”, and mechanically that is exactly what it is. You talk to a receptionist in the lobby, choose a tier, and get assigned a numbered unit with a door only you can open.

What makes it genuinely new is not the storage. It is the threat model. Everything else in Rust that holds your loot can be broken with sulfur. A stone wall, a sheet metal door, an armored door, they all have a health pool and a C4 count. An apartment door has neither. It sits inside a safe zone with peacekeeper turrets, in a no build zone of 159,043 square metres, which is nearly twice the footprint of the Missile Silo. You cannot place a timed explosive charge on it, you cannot rocket it, and you cannot pick the lock.

The only door opener in the game is the Apartment Key, and Facepunch sell it to your enemies out of a vending slot in your own basement for 1,000 scrap.

That trade is the whole monument. You get storage that no raid can reach, in exchange for a real time rent clock and one specific, expensive, five minute vulnerability.

The courtyard of the Rust Apartment Complex, a safe zone monument covered by peacekeeper turrets — Peacekeeper turrets cover the courtyard, the lobby and the marketplace. Your own room is the one place they do not reach.

The Rust apartment update: what shipped and what changed

Two devblogs matter here, and if you read a guide written in July it is already out of date.

Common Ground, 2 July 2026

The launch update. It added the Apartment Complex monument, the three room tiers, the fourteen rentable shops in the courtyard marketplace, the basement security NPC and the Apartment Key. It also shipped the new clan system and clan tables, plus the Softcore raid windows, though neither of those touch the apartments.

Power Trip, 6 August 2026

The first re-tune, and it is the reason older apartment guides now give bad advice. Four apartment changes landed:

Banked rent is now capped at 72 hours. At launch you could dump a huge pile of scrap into the rent slot and vanish for a week. You cannot any more. Three days is the maximum buffer on both rooms and shops.
The Master Key finally has a model. Facepunch admitted it “shipped without a model” in July. It now has a full view model and animations, so you can see what you are holding when you crack a neighbour’s door.
Stealing after the timer expires is patched out. A bug let raiders keep pulling items out of a room or shop after the five minute window ended. That is fixed, so the timer is now a hard stop.
Hardcore mode PvP inside apartments works. Players previously could not shoot each other inside a room in hardcore. They can now.

Rust apartment update timeline from the Common Ground devblog in July 2026 to the Power Trip rent cap in August 2026 — Every apartment change so far. The 72 hour rent cap is the one that will catch people out.

The 72 hour cap is a trap for weekend players If you log in on Sunday night and top up your rent slot expecting to be covered until next weekend, you are not. The slot will refuse anything past 72 hours of cover. A basement room can hold a maximum of 30 scrap of banked rent, a standard apartment 150, a penthouse 300 and a shop 720. Anything beyond that has to be paid on a later login, and if you do not log in, you are evicted.

Rust Apartment Complex at a glance

62Rentable rooms

14Rentable shops

25Cheapest room, scrap

SafeZone status

Rust Apartment Complex amenities: repair bench, research table and elevators on site, but no recycler, no radiation and no scientists — What is on site and what is not. The right hand column is the reason most players get one trip out of this monument and never come back.

Feature	Apartment Complex	Notes
Monument tier	Tier 1	Safe zone category, same bracket as Outpost and Bandit Camp
Safe zone	Yes	Peacekeeper turrets on the exterior, lobby, corridors and market
Radiation	None	No hazmat suit needed at any point
Recycler	None	The single biggest complaint about the monument
Repair Bench	1	Public access, no rental needed
Research Table	1	Public access, no rental needed
Scientists	None	Nothing to fight, nothing to farm
Keycard puzzle	None	No green keycard, no fuse, no hackable crate
Loot spawns	6 roadsigns, 2 hobo barrels	This is not a looting monument
Vendors	1	Apartment Complex Security NPC, in the basement
Elevators	3	Plus 6 zipline target points off the roof
Telephones	2	Every rented room also has its own working phone
Tunnel entrance	Yes	Connects to the underground tunnel network
No build zone	159,043 m²	Roughly 1.75x the Missile Silo footprint
Chinook drop zone	No	No locked crate event here
Patrol heli crash	No	Safe zone, so the heli will not engage over it

Is there a recycler at the Apartment Complex?

No. There is no recycler at the Rust Apartment Complex, and there never has been. This is the most searched question about the monument by a wide margin, and the answer is a flat no.

What you get instead is a Repair Bench and a Research Table, both free to use without renting anything. That is a genuinely useful pair for a fresh spawn, because it means you can research a blueprint on the spot and repair your gear without walking to Outpost. But there is nothing on site that will turn components into scrap, which is awkward given the entire monument runs on scrap.

Where to recycle instead Take the tunnel entrance. The Apartment Complex connects to the underground tunnel network, and tunnel stations have recyclers. Otherwise the nearest options are Outpost or Bandit Camp, both of which run safe zone recyclers at 40 percent return rather than the 60 percent you get from a monument recycler. Our full Rust recycler guide has the complete recycle chart and every location.

Rust apartment rent cost: every tier

Here are the real numbers. A lot of guides published in July quote 100, 200 and 400 scrap for the three tiers. Those figures came from the staging branch and they are wrong on live. The correct costs, confirmed by both the RustHelp monument data and Rustafied’s post launch breakdown, are below.

Rust Apartment Complex rent cost table: basement 25 scrap, standard 150 scrap, penthouse 350 scrap up front plus daily rent — Up front cost, daily rent, how many exist and how much storage each one holds.

Room type	Up front	Rent per day	Units on the map	Storage slots	7 day wipe total
Basement Room	25 scrap	10 scrap	16	134	95 scrap
Standard Apartment	150 scrap	50 scrap	40	282	500 scrap
Penthouse	350 scrap	100 scrap	6	391	1,050 scrap
Rentable Shop	100 scrap	240 scrap (10/hour)	14	Vending stock	1,780 scrap

A few things fall straight out of that table.

The basement room is absurdly cheap. Ninety five scrap covers a full seven day wipe. That is less than a single green keycard run’s worth of scrap, and it buys you 134 storage slots that no amount of C4 can open.

The penthouse is a status symbol, not a value play. It costs eleven times what a basement does over a wipe and gives you under three times the storage. You are paying for the arcade machine and the view.

And the shop is the expensive one by a mile, because its rent is charged per real world hour rather than per day. A shop left open for a week costs more than eighteen basement rooms.

What is inside each apartment

Rust apartment room tiers compared: basement, standard apartment and penthouse storage slots and amenities — The three tiers side by side. Every room, including the cheapest, ships with a bed and a Tier 1 workbench.

Every rented unit, from the grimmest basement to the penthouse, comes furnished with the same baseline: a bed with the standard 10 minute respawn cooldown, a working telephone, a toilet, a sink with drinkable water, and a built in Tier 1 workbench. That baseline alone solves the four hardest problems of a fresh spawn.

Basement room

134 storage slots. A two slot stove, a small locker, no furnace and no window. Sixteen of them exist. It is a concrete box with a bed in it and it is the best deal in the game.

Standard apartment

282 storage slots. A three slot stove, a full size locker, a small furnace, a fridge and an actual window. Forty of them exist, so this is the tier you will usually find free. The small furnace matters more than it sounds, because it means you can smelt without leaving the safe zone.

Penthouse

391 storage slots. Two floors, a four slot stove, a large furnace, a fridge, a radio, a Chippy arcade machine and the best view in the monument. Only six exist on any map, so they go early on a fresh wipe and they are the first thing anybody with a key goes looking for.

Inside a standard Rust apartment room with a bed, storage, furnace and fridge at the Apartment Complex monument — A standard apartment. Bed, fridge, small furnace, full locker and 282 slots of storage behind one unraidable door.

You cannot downgrade Once you are in a tier, the receptionist will let you upgrade but not drop back down. The only way out of a penthouse you can no longer afford is to abandon it entirely, which means clearing it out first. Start in the basement and move up when your scrap income justifies it, not the other way round.

How to rent an apartment in Rust

A stairwell inside the Rust Apartment Complex monument showing the safe zone corridors between rented rooms — Three elevators and one long stairwell. The corridors are safe zone. Your own room is not.

Walk into the lobby and find the receptionist. They stand behind the check in desk on the ground floor. No key, no card and no fuse required to get this far.
Pick your tier. The dialogue offers Basement, Standard and Penthouse with the up front cost shown. You need that scrap in your inventory.
Confirm. The receptionist asks you to confirm, then assigns you a specific room number.
Go find your unit. Take an elevator or the stairwell. Your door will open for you and nobody else.
Feed the rent slot immediately. There is a scrap slot on the wall right beside your front door. Put scrap in it now, not later. Rent burns in real world time from the moment you rent.
Set your bed as a spawn point. This is the whole reason to do it on wipe day. You now have a safe zone respawn with a workbench and storage.

Come back to the receptionist later After the first rental, talking to the receptionist again opens a second menu: confirm which room is yours if you forgot the number, pay rent, upgrade a tier, or abandon the room entirely. If you plan to stop paying, abandon it properly rather than letting it lapse, because abandoning lets you take your things and eviction does not.

Rentable shops: the marketplace explained

The courtyard holds fourteen player run shops. You approach a stall, interact with the contract hanging out front, and it shows you the bill. Once you own it, it behaves like a vending machine you can stock, price and rename, and you can repaint the sign above the door.

A player run rentable shop at the Rust Apartment Complex marketplace lit with neon signs at night — Fourteen stalls, inside a safe zone, with foot traffic a roadside vending machine will never see.

Rust apartment rentable shop cost: 100 scrap deposit, 10 scrap per hour rent and 220 scrap to open the doors — Shop economics. The 220 scrap figure is the one people miss, because the game will not let you open with less than 12 hours of rent banked.

Cost	Amount	Notes
Deposit	100 scrap	Non refundable, gone the moment you sign
Rent	10 scrap per real hour	240 scrap a day, burning whether you are online or not
Minimum rent to open	12 hours = 120 scrap	Facepunch’s own requirement
Total to open the doors	220 scrap	Deposit plus the mandatory 12 hour buffer
Maximum banked rent	72 hours = 720 scrap	Capped by the Power Trip update
Takeover unlocked after	6 hours of trading	Any other player can then buy you out
Takeover cost	2x, then 3x, then 4x	Escalates on both the deposit and the hourly rent
Stock grace period	24 hours	Come back and interact to collect your items
Drone access	No	Shops cannot be bought from remotely by drone

The takeover mechanic is the interesting part and it is genuinely clever design. After six hours, any player can seize your stall by paying double what you paid. If somebody takes it from them, that player pays triple. The multiplier keeps climbing until whoever holds it runs out of rent, at which point the shop and the multiplier both reset to base. On a busy server a good pitch can spiral to four or five times base cost before it collapses.

The master key opens shops too Facepunch spell this out in the devblog: the Apartment Key works on rentable shops exactly like it works on rooms. A shop is a storefront, not a vault. Stock it with what you intend to sell and keep your guns, explosives and blueprints somewhere else.

The Apartment Key: the only way in

Rust Apartment Key stats: 1000 scrap from the basement security NPC, single use, 30 second breach and 5 minutes of access — The Apartment Key. No sulfur, no charcoal, no explosives at all. Just a very large pile of scrap.

The Apartment Key, called the Master Key in the devblog, is the single most important item at this monument. Its in game description is deliberately understated: an old rusty key that can open the door to an apartment.

Stat	Value	Notes
Price	1,000 scrap	Base price, and vendor prices in Rust drift with demand
Sold by	Apartment Complex Security NPC	In the basement of the building itself
Uses	1	Consumed the moment you complete a break in
Breach time	Hold E for 30 seconds	You are standing still and exposed for all of it
Access window	5 minutes (300 seconds)	Hard stop since the Power Trip patch
Works on	Any occupied room or shop	Vacant units are not targets
Stack size	1	You cannot hoard keys for a multi room spree
Despawn time	1 hour	Do not drop it and go do something else
Shortname	`apartment.master_key`	Item ID 1664052604
Craftable	No	Vendor only, no blueprint, no research

Stack size 1 is the balance lever This is the same trick Facepunch used on the red keycard. Because the key does not stack, you cannot carry six of them and clear a floor. Every single room you want to open is a separate 1,000 scrap trip back down to the basement, which is exactly why apartment robbery stays a targeted crime instead of a farm.

How an apartment break in actually works

How to raid a Rust apartment: pay the guard, read the terminal, buy the key, hold E for 30 seconds and loot for 5 minutes — The full sequence, from guard bribe to loot timer. Total cost 1,050 scrap and zero sulfur.

Raiding an apartment has nothing in common with raiding a base. There is no sulfur, no rockets, no farm and no raid base. It is a scrap transaction followed by a thirty second stare at a door.

Pay the basement guard 50 scrap. He opens the security computer room for 300 seconds.
Read the security terminal. It lists every room and shop in the building, whether it is occupied, and a value rating: Null, Low, Medium or High.
Buy the Apartment Key for 1,000 scrap. Same NPC. One key, one door.
Hold E on the target door for 30 seconds. This is the risky part. You are stationary in a corridor and anyone can walk past.
Loot for five minutes. The room flips from safe zone to combat zone the moment you are through.

That last point is the mechanic worth understanding properly. Inside a breached room, combat is enabled for both sides. The thief can shoot the tenant and the tenant can shoot the thief, and neither of them gets flagged hostile for the surrounding safe zone. If the tenant is online and armed, a break in is a fair fight in a very small room. If the tenant is asleep in the bed they set as their spawn, it is a mugging.

Sulfur in your room paints a target on it This is the single most important thing in this guide and almost nobody mentions it. The value rating on the security terminal is driven by explosive materials. Sulfur, gun powder, timed explosive charges and anything else that feeds a raid pushes a room from Low straight to High. Every would be thief in the building is reading that list before they spend 1,050 scrap. Store your raid materials in your actual base and keep the apartment for guns, blueprints, components and your rebuild kit.

How to defend your apartment

You have fewer options than you would in a base, but you are not helpless.

Keep the value rating low. No sulfur, no gun powder, no explosives. A room the terminal reads as Low is not worth 1,050 scrap to anyone.
Do not put your bed there if you are a target. A spawn point in a room somebody is watching means you wake up in a fight you did not choose.
Be online during peak hours if you have a High room. Thirty seconds of breach time is a long time in Rust. If you are in there with a shotgun when the door swings, you have the range advantage and they have used up their key.
Split your storage across tiers. Two basement rooms cost 190 scrap a wipe and give you 268 slots across two doors that each need their own 1,000 scrap key. That is meaningfully harder to clear out than one penthouse.
Take the whole floor if you are a clan. Rooms are per player, so a five person group can hold five adjacent doors. A thief with one key gets one room and then has to walk back down to the basement past four angry neighbours.

Two basement rooms beat one penthouse Two basements: 190 scrap a wipe, 268 slots, two separate 1,000 scrap keys to clear. One penthouse: 1,050 scrap a wipe, 391 slots, one key clears the lot. You give up 123 slots and save 860 scrap while doubling what it costs to rob you. If you only take one idea from this guide, take that one.

Is renting a Rust apartment worth it?

Divide the seven day cost by the storage slots and the picture is not close:

Tier	7 day cost	Slots	Scrap per slot	Verdict
Basement	95 scrap	134	0.71	Best value in the game
Standard	500 scrap	282	1.77	Fine if you want the furnace
Penthouse	1,050 scrap	391	2.69	Pay it for the flex, not the maths

Rent one if you are

A solo or duo. Ninety five scrap to protect your blueprints, guns and rebuild kit from every raid on the server is the cheapest insurance policy Rust has ever offered.
Playing the first day of a wipe. A safe zone bed, a Tier 1 workbench and a free research table on hour one is a genuine head start.
A trader. The shop rent is steep, but a safe zone stall with real foot traffic sells stock that would rot on a roadside vending machine.
Rebuilding after being raided. This is the killer use case. Keep one basement room stocked as your restart kit and getting wiped stops being a wipe.

Skip it if you are

In an established group. Your main base already holds more than 391 slots and the scrap is better spent on C4.
An irregular player. Rent burns in real world time. Miss 24 hours and everything inside is deleted, not dropped, not stored. Deleted.
Sitting on raid materials. Sulfur pushes your value rating to High and buys you a queue of visitors.

Rent resets when the map does. Every room, every shop and every scrap you banked disappears on force wipe, so know the date before you sign a lease.

Check the wipe countdown

Five mistakes people are making with apartments

Renting the penthouse on day one. Three hundred and fifty scrap up front on wipe day is scrap you needed for a workbench. The basement does the same job for 25.
Treating the rent slot as fire and forget. It caps at 72 hours now. You have to come back.
Storing sulfur in there. Covered above, and it is the mistake that gets people robbed.
Letting a room lapse instead of abandoning it. Abandoning through the receptionist lets you clear the room out first. Eviction deletes the contents.
Assuming the safe zone protects you inside your own door. It does not. The moment a key turns, your room is a combat zone and the turrets outside do not care.

Rust Apartment Complex FAQ

How much does it cost to rent an apartment in Rust?

A basement room costs 25 scrap up front plus 10 scrap per day. A standard apartment costs 150 scrap up front plus 50 scrap per day. A penthouse costs 350 scrap up front plus 100 scrap per day. Over a full seven day wipe that works out at 95, 500 and 1,050 scrap respectively.

Is there a recycler at the Apartment Complex in Rust?

No. The Apartment Complex has no recycler at all. It does have a free Repair Bench and a free Research Table, but nothing that converts components into scrap. Use the tunnel entrance to reach a tunnel station recycler, or go to Outpost or Bandit Camp.

Can you raid apartments in Rust?

Not with explosives. Apartment doors have no health pool and the whole monument is a safe zone with a no build area of 159,043 square metres. The only way into an occupied room is the Apartment Key, which costs 1,000 scrap from the basement security NPC, takes 30 seconds of holding E to breach, and gives you 5 minutes inside.

Where do you buy the master key in Rust?

From the Apartment Complex Security NPC in the basement of the Apartment Complex itself. It costs 1,000 scrap, it is single use, and it does not stack, so you can only carry one at a time.

How long does an apartment break in last in Rust?

Five minutes, or 300 seconds, from the moment the door opens. The Power Trip update on 6 August 2026 fixed a bug that let raiders keep taking items after the timer ran out, so it is now a hard cut off.

What happens if you do not pay rent in Rust?

You get 24 hours of grace. After that you are evicted and every item inside the room is destroyed, not dropped and not stored. The same rule applies to rentable shops. If you want out, abandon the room through the receptionist instead, which lets you clear it first.

How much rent can you store in advance?

A maximum of 72 hours since the Power Trip update on 6 August 2026. That is 30 scrap for a basement room, 150 for a standard apartment, 300 for a penthouse and 720 for a shop. Before that patch there was no cap.

How many apartments are there in the Rust Apartment Complex?

Sixty two rentable rooms in total: 16 basement rooms, 40 standard apartments and 6 penthouses, plus 14 rentable shops in the courtyard marketplace.

Is the Rust Apartment Complex a safe zone?

Yes. The exterior, lobby, corridors and marketplace are all safe zone, covered by peacekeeper turrets. The exception is a rented room during a break in, which flips to a combat zone for five minutes so both the thief and the tenant can shoot each other.

Does the Apartment Complex have radiation?

No. There is no radiation anywhere at the Apartment Complex, so you do not need a hazmat suit, anti radiation pills or any protective clothing to visit or to live there.

Can you put a sleeping bag or bed in a Rust apartment?

Every rented room already comes with a bed built in, on the standard 10 minute respawn cooldown. You set it as your spawn point the same way you would in your own base, which gives you a safe zone respawn from the first hour of a wipe.

How much do rentable shops cost in Rust?

A 100 scrap non refundable deposit plus 10 scrap per real world hour. You need at least 12 hours of rent banked to open, so the real figure to unlock the doors is 220 scrap. A full day of trading costs 240 scrap in rent.

Can someone take over your shop in Rust?

Yes. After a shop has been open for 6 hours, any other player can take it over by paying double the deposit and double the hourly rent. That multiplier escalates to 3x, then 4x and so on with each takeover until whoever holds it runs out of rent, at which point the shop and the multiplier reset. You get 24 hours to collect any stock left inside.

Which apartment tier is the best value in Rust?

The basement room, by a long way. It costs 0.71 scrap per storage slot over a seven day wipe against 1.77 for a standard apartment and 2.69 for a penthouse. Two basement rooms cost 190 scrap for 268 slots and force a thief to buy two separate 1,000 scrap keys.

What does the security guard in the apartment basement do?

He does two jobs. For 50 scrap he opens the computer room for 300 seconds, where a terminal lists every room and shop with a value rating of Null, Low, Medium or High. He also sells the 1,000 scrap Apartment Key.

Are there CCTV codes for the Rust Apartment Complex?

There are no published fixed CCTV identifiers for the apartments the way there are for the oil rigs or the Missile Silo. Room surveillance runs through the basement security terminal, which you access by paying the guard 50 scrap rather than by typing a code into a computer station.

When was the Apartment Complex added to Rust?

In the Common Ground update on 2 July 2026, alongside the rentable shops and the new clan system. It was re-tuned a month later in the Power Trip update on 6 August 2026, which capped banked rent at 72 hours and gave the Master Key a proper view model.

Sources

Facepunch news post Common Ground, 2 July 2026, for the monument announcement, the room tiers, the rent slot and eviction rule, the master key, and every rentable shop mechanic including the 12 hour minimum, the 6 hour takeover window, the escalating multiplier and the 24 hour stock grace period.
Facepunch news post Power Trip, 6 August 2026, for the 72 hour banked rent cap, the master key view model, the break in timer fix and the hardcore mode apartment PvP fix.
RustHelp Rust Wiki, Apartment Complex monument page, for the rent table, unit counts, no build area, safe zone status, spawn counts and the full usable entity list.
RustHelp Rust Wiki, item page for apartment.master_key, for the 1,000 scrap price, the basement security NPC vendor, stack size, despawn time and item ID.
Rustafied, Common Ground Update and Apartment Complex first looks, for the confirmed 25/150/350 scrap tier pricing, the Tier 1 workbench in every room and the safe zone versus combat zone rule.
Corrosion Hour, RUST Apartment Complex Monument Guide, for the storage slot counts, per tier furnishings, the bed respawn timer, the 50 scrap security terminal fee and the Null/Low/Medium/High value ratings.
SkinLords apartment rental and raiding guides, for the 30 second breach time and independent confirmation of the tier pricing.
The whenisforcewiperust.com Rust monuments guide for the Missile Silo no build comparison, and the Rust recycler guide for the safe zone recycler return rates.