Rent is an American Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical, with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson. After previews that began on January 26, 1996, it opened in New York City on February 13, 1996, at the New York Theatre Workshop before moving to Broadway, opening at the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996. With more than 4,000 performances and still running, it is the seventh-longest-running Broadway show. Based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La boheme, the musical centers on a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Alphabet City in the early 1990s, under the shadow of AIDS.

Rent was one of the first Broadway musicals to clearly feature gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgender characters. It is also noted for its ethnically diverse cast, which includes many racial minorities in its ensemble and leading roles. Rent is considered revolutionary for bringing controversial topics and counterculture to a traditionally conservative medium, and is credited with increasing the popularity of musical theater in the younger generation. Many critics have also mentioned how the show speaks to Generation X the same way that the musical HAIR spoke to those who grew up in the 1960s, calling it "a rock opera for our time, a Hair for the 90s."

The cast album from the show was the most successful recording of an American musical in almost 30 years, featuring both a double-disc "complete recording" collection with a remixed version of the song "Seasons of Love" featuring Stevie Wonder and a single-disc "best of" highlights.

Rent has been enormously successful on Broadway, enjoying both critical acclaim and word-of-mouth popularity, recently celebrating its Tenth Anniversary on April 24, 2006, with a special performance by its entire original cast.