Short version. If you are a college student, BTM Layout, Banashankari and Basavanagudi give you the most room and food for your money. If you are a fresher joining an IT job, do not pick by rent at all — pick the area that sits on the same side of the city as your office. Koramangala for the startup belt, HSR Layout or Bellandur for the Outer Ring Road stretch, Electronic City for the Hosur Road campuses, Whitefield or Marathahalli for the east. Get this one call wrong and you pay for it twice a day, every working day, for a year.
Bangalore is the city where the map lies to you. Koramangala to Bellandur is about 9 km. On paper that is a twenty-minute ride. On a Tuesday at 6.40 pm it is fifty minutes, most of it spent looking at the underside of the Silk Board flyover. Nobody tells freshers this before they sign, and it is the single most expensive mistake in the whole search. You can always change your PG. You cannot change where Silk Board is.
This guide walks through the seven areas people actually shortlist, what each one costs in 2026, and who it suits. If you already know your budget and want the rent-band breakdown instead, read what ₹6,000 vs ₹10,000 vs ₹15,000 actually buys you in Bangalore. To see what is available right now, start with PG and hostel listings across Bangalore.
The rent bands, side by side
These are 2026 numbers for a shared room, twin or triple sharing, in a standard PG with two meals. Single occupancy in the same building usually adds ₹4,000–₹7,000. AC adds ₹1,500–₹2,500 plus a separate electricity slab, which is where a lot of budgets quietly break.
| Area | Shared PG rent | Best for | The commute catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koramangala | ₹9,000–₹16,000 | Startup employees, walkable social life | Fine within Koramangala, painful eastward |
| HSR Layout | ₹8,500–₹15,000 | ORR and Sarjapur Road offices | Agara junction on the morning run |
| Indiranagar | ₹10,000–₹18,000 | Metro access, MG Road and Domlur offices | Priciest per square foot on this list |
| BTM Layout | ₹6,500–₹11,000 | Students, first-year budgets | Silk Board sits right next door |
| Marathahalli | ₹7,000–₹12,000 | ORR east, Whitefield-adjacent jobs | The bridge, in both directions |
| Electronic City | ₹6,000–₹10,000 | Infosys, Wipro, Hosur Road campuses | You are effectively off the city map |
| Whitefield | ₹7,500–₹13,000 | ITPL, east Bangalore MNCs | Self-contained, but far from everything else |
Koramangala — you pay for the walk, not the room
Koramangala is where a lot of Bangalore's product companies and half its cafes live. The reason it commands a premium is not the rooms, which are ordinary, but the fact that you can walk to work, to dinner and to a coworking space without touching a main road. For a fresher at a startup in 4th or 5th Block, this is genuinely worth ₹3,000 extra a month.
Expect ₹9,000–₹16,000 for a shared room. The 5th and 6th Block pockets run highest. Older buildings in 1st and 8th Block are meaningfully cheaper and often nicer inside than the rate suggests. Food is not a problem here at any hour, which matters more than people expect when your first job has unpredictable evenings. Browse PGs and hostels in Koramangala to see the current spread — we have both co-ed and gents options listed in the 5th Block and 80 Feet Road pockets.
The catch is that Koramangala only works if your office is on the same side. People take a Koramangala room for the lifestyle and then discover their office is in Bellandur. That is a fifty-minute evening ride they signed up for without realising it.
HSR Layout — the Outer Ring Road answer
HSR is what Koramangala was about eight years ago: sectors of quiet residential streets slowly filling up with PGs, cafes and small offices. It suits anyone working along the Outer Ring Road towards Bellandur, Sarjapur Road or the Ecospace and Embassy Tech Village cluster, because HSR sits on the correct side of the Agara bottleneck for that run.
Shared rooms sit around ₹8,500–₹15,000, with Sector 1 and 2 cheaper than the Sector 6 and 7 end. HSR has become the default answer for freshers who want Koramangala's feel with slightly more space, and rents have moved accordingly. We do not currently have listings inside HSR itself, so if you are shortlisting there, treat this section as orientation and check the neighbouring options below.
Bellandur — closest you get to the ORR offices
If your offer letter says Ecospace, Embassy Tech Village, Cessna Business Park or anything on that stretch, Bellandur is the shortest possible commute you can buy. On a good day it is a fifteen-minute ride. That is a rare thing in this city and it is why rents here have caught up with HSR despite Bellandur being a far less charming place to live.
Budget ₹9,000–₹15,000 for shared. Co-living operators are heavily represented here, so a lot of what you see will be managed stays with housekeeping and a fixed food plan rather than owner-run PGs. That is worth understanding before you compare rates, and our breakdown of whether co-living is worth the premium covers exactly what you gain and lose. Current PG options in Bellandur sit at the managed end of that range.
The honest downside: Bellandur is a work address that people also sleep in. Evenings are quiet, the lake is what it is, and you will end up travelling for anything social.
Indiranagar — good if the Metro does your commuting
Indiranagar is the most liveable area on this list and the most expensive. Tree-lined streets, the Purple Line running through it, and enough restaurants that you will never cook. Shared PG rooms start around ₹10,000 and run to ₹18,000, and the stock is thinner than in Koramangala because a lot of the housing is family rentals rather than PGs.
It makes sense for one specific person: someone whose office is on or near a Metro station. If your commute is Indiranagar to MG Road, Trinity or Domlur, you have effectively opted out of Bangalore traffic, and that is worth paying for. If your office is in Whitefield or Electronic City, the Metro will not save you and you are paying Indiranagar rent for nothing.
BTM Layout and the south Bangalore student belt
BTM Layout is where a very large share of Bangalore's students and first-year IT hires actually live, because ₹6,500–₹11,000 gets you a real room with meals. The density of PGs, mess halls and coaching centres in BTM is unmatched. It also sits close enough to Silk Board that your morning commute towards Electronic City is fast and your morning commute towards Whitefield is not.
The wider south Bangalore belt around it is underrated by freshers who have only read Reddit threads about Koramangala. Banashankari and Basavanagudi both sit in the ₹6,000–₹10,000 range, on well-established streets with proper bus coverage and markets that have been there for forty years. Basavanagudi in particular is the right call if you are at BMS College or National College — it is walkable, not commutable, which is a different category of convenience.
JP Nagar is the other one worth a look, especially the stretch off Bannerghatta Road. It is quieter than BTM, marginally pricier, and gives you a clean run to Electronic City without living in Electronic City.
Marathahalli, Electronic City and Whitefield — the campus areas
These three follow the same logic: they exist around large employers, and living in them makes sense almost exclusively if you work in them.
Electronic City at ₹6,000–₹10,000 is the cheapest serious option in Bangalore and completely rational if your campus is there. Phase 1 and 2 have a dense PG ecosystem built specifically around shift timings. The trade-off is that you are 20 km from the rest of the city and the elevated expressway is your only fast way in. Weekend plans in Indiranagar become a project.
Marathahalli at ₹7,000–₹12,000 is the value option for east Bangalore. Good market, good food, plenty of stock. The bridge is the problem — it is a genuine daily tax in both directions, and where you sit relative to it matters more than which street you are on.
Whitefield at ₹7,500–₹13,000 has improved a lot since the Metro extension. It is a self-contained mini-city with malls, hospitals and its own social life, which makes it more liveable than Electronic City. It is still an hour-plus from central Bangalore whenever you need to be there.
Central Bangalore, if you actually work there
People forget the centre exists. If your office is around MG Road, Richmond Road or the CBD, staying central removes the commute question entirely. Stays around Brigade Road run roughly ₹9,000–₹14,000 shared and put you inside walking distance of the whole central business district. It is loud, and it is not where you go for a quiet study routine, but for a first job in the centre it is the least wasteful option on this page.
How to actually decide, in three questions
- Where exactly is my office or campus, and what is between us? Open a map at 6.30 pm on a weekday, not at noon. If a known choke point — Silk Board, Agara, the Marathahalli bridge, Hebbal — sits between you and work, that area is more expensive than its rent suggests.
- What is the rent gap actually buying? If moving 8 km further out saves ₹3,000 a month and adds 90 minutes of travel a day, you are selling about 30 hours a month for ₹3,000. That is a bad rate for anyone.
- Can I get out on a Saturday? Electronic City and Whitefield are fine to work from and dull to live in. If your weekends matter to you, weight that before you sign a six-month lock-in.
Once you have an area, the next question is what your budget actually gets inside it — deposit norms, what ₹6,000 leaves out, and the seven checks that matter before you hand over money. That is the whole of the Bangalore budget guide linked at the top of this page, and it is the right thing to read next.
