A community assistant (CA) is a part-time, on-site staff role at a student housing community.
CAs support the leasing office, help run resident events and share after-hours duty, and the position can come with a discounted apartment as part of the deal.
The employer is the property's operator, not a university.
This guide covers the work, the employers, the requirements, pay and housing, and where the role leads.
What is a community assistant?
Community assistant is a student housing job title.
The community assistant works on site at a student apartment community for the company that operates it, alongside the community's full-time leasing staff and manager.
The role bundles three kinds of work: leasing support at the front desk and on tours, resident events and community life, and a share of the after-hours and weekend duty coverage.
Operators weight the mix community by community; the posting describes the split.
The schedule is part-time by design, built so the job fits around class schedules — and the work is property management experience students can carry into a full-time role after graduation.
Two neighboring jobs are worth separating from the CA.
The resident assistant (RA) is a residence-life appointment: the employer is the college or university, and the work is hall life and student conduct in the dorms.
The leasing consultant, or leasing agent, is the leasing specialist at any apartment community.
The CA is the operator's student housing hybrid: part leasing support, part community life, part duty coverage.
On this board the community assistant sits in the leasing and office group beside the leasing agent and the leasing manager — related jobs that share leasing work but not the job.
Community assistant duties
A CA's week is shifts, and the shifts fall into three buckets: the leasing office, the community calendar and the duty rotation.
Leasing support is front-desk and leasing-office time.
It covers greeting prospects, answering calls and messages, helping with guest cards and follow-up, sitting in on tours, and helping applicants and new residents through paperwork and move-in logistics.
The community's full-time leasing staff and manager supervise the work; as support staff, CAs assist the process rather than own it, and decisions such as application approvals are not the CA's to make.
Events are the community's social side: planning, promoting and running resident events, and keeping the community's channels active through the school year.
Duty coverage is the after-hours share.
CAs take evening, weekend and overnight shifts on a rotation the operator sets, covering lockouts, noise complaints and facility walk-throughs until the full-time team is back.
Move-in and turn season concentrate the workload around those peaks.
- Leasing-office shifts: prospects, tour support, guest cards and follow-up
- Resident events: plan, promote, run
- After-hours duty rotation: lockouts, noise calls, walk-throughs
- Move-in and turn support during peak weeks
- Administrative help around the leasing office
Who hires community assistants?
The employer is a student housing operator: an owner or management company that runs apartment communities serving a student population.
The sector is large enough to staff.
NMHC's 2025 Student Housing Income & Expense Benchmarking Survey drew on 16 student housing providers covering 719 properties, 144,149 units and 400,224 beds across 44 states — 2.8 beds per unit in that sample, our arithmetic on NMHC's figures.
The big multifamily managers run student portfolios too.
Greystar ranks No. 1 on NMHC's 2026 Top 50 Managers list with 1,014,091 units managed, including 30,910 student housing units, and Asset Living ranks No. 2 with 446,427 units, including 50,849 student housing units.
At a student community the CA's part-time shifts sit around a full-time core — community manager, assistant manager, leasing staff, maintenance — covering desk hours, events and duty.
Universities staff their own residence halls through residence life, with RAs rather than CAs.
The CA job sits on the operator's side of student housing.
Community assistant requirements
Our research found no published national education, enrollment or certification requirement for the community assistant title.
Each operator sets the requirements its posting asks for: schedule availability, customer-facing fit and any experience the community needs.
The one outside requirement to check is licensing.
States decide who may lease rentals or collect rents for others, and at least one state licenses that work directly.
Illinois's residential leasing agent license (225 ILCS 454/5-5) covers leasing or renting residential property and collecting rents, and its licensees must be sponsored and employed by a sponsoring broker.
Illinois also runs a supervised startup path.
A person may do residential leasing for up to 120 consecutive days without the license when a sponsoring broker who has notified the Department supervises them, and they enroll in the pre-license course within 60 days.
Whether any of that reaches a community assistant depends on the state, on which duties the role actually performs and on who employs the assistant.
Licensing follows duties and employment, not the job title.
Confirm the current rules with your state's real estate licensing agency before you rely on any exemption.
Licensing is state by state
Community assistant pay and housing
Our research found no BLS series for the community assistant title.
The closest available group is counter and rental clerks (SOC 41-2021): BLS maps the title Apartment Rental Clerk to it, and O*NET lists Leasing Consultant among its reported titles.
It is a cross-industry series that includes car-rental and other counter clerks, so read it as the nearest cohort, not CA pay.
In BLS's OEWS May 2025 release, that group's median pay was $41,300 per year, or $19.86 per hour.
Our research found no published national figures for community assistant pay itself, for discount levels or for hiring cycles.
Pay varies by operator, market and hours, and the posting prices the role.
The second piece of the deal is housing: where a CA position includes an apartment, the offer sets the rent terms.
The tax question follows the apartment.
IRC §119(a) excludes employer-provided lodging from income only if it is furnished for the employer's convenience and the employee is required to accept it on the employer's business premises as a condition of employment.
Two IRS side notes matter here.
The employee-discount exclusion does not apply to discounts on real property, per IRS Pub 15-B.
And IRC §119(d)'s qualified campus lodging rule applies only to employees of educational institutions and academic health centers — a community assistant employed by a private operator cannot use it.
Whether a specific offer is excluded from income depends on its facts.
A CPA can review it before you accept the job or write the offer.
One scheduling note: the FLSA does not define full-time or part-time work — the employer generally decides, and part-time status does not change how the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime rules apply.
The community assistant salary page carries the full BLS table for the closest available group, so you can see the national spread behind the median.
Path to leasing and management
The CA job is an entry rung with a view of the whole ladder.
NAA Education Institute says residential property management careers offer room for growth "as the industry typically promotes from within."
The rungs above the CA run through leasing first, then management.
NAAEI's Career Map lines its credentials up with those rungs: CALP for leasing, CAM for community managers and CAPS for portfolio and regional supervisors.
They are industry credentials, not state licenses.
CALP comes with an experience bar worth planning around: NAAEI requires at least six months of onsite leasing experience and issues a provisional certificate until it is met.
BLS describes the management ladder beyond leasing: people may start as onsite managers, move into assistant property manager positions, or begin as assistant managers and advance to property manager.
Responsibilities grow with more and larger properties, and experienced managers may open their own firms.
The property manager guide covers where that track leads.
Student housing adds its own version of the same ladder: assistant manager and community manager of a student community, then regional roles over a group of properties.
Find community assistant jobs
Student housing operators post community assistant openings when they need desk hours, events and duty coverage staffed, and the postings show how each community splits the mix.
Browse community assistant jobs on PropertyManagerHires — a board that lists only property management work, from student housing operators to management companies.
An application that gets read shows the three things the job runs on: customer-facing work, schedule availability and any campus or community involvement that maps to the events side.
Career information, not legal, tax or licensing advice. Licensing, pay and tax rules change and vary by state; confirm current requirements with your state's real estate licensing agency, the IRS or a CPA, as the question needs.