Homeownership Is Declining, No Matter How You Measure It

The homeownership rate in the United States fell for the second consecutive year, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. An estimated 59 percent of adults over the age of 25 were homeowners in 2025, down 50 basis points in each of the last two years. This individual-level homeownership rate has fallen close to a recent low set in 2017, when the economy was still recovering from the Great Financial Crisis. Meanwhile, 65 percent of households were owner-occupied, also down a full percentage point since 2023.

While these two measures show a similar trend, they paint subtly different pictures of the national housing market. The household measure – the green line above, showing the share of homes that are owner-occupied – has long been the standard method for reporting homeownership in the United States, for example in the Census Bureau’s Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership Report. However, calculating the homeownership rate at the household level can fail to capture nuance in the composition of who lives in those households. This is important because there has been a gradual, decades-long increase in adults living in owner-occupied homes without themselves being a homeowner, largely driven by adults living with their parents into their 20s and 30s. See our related article, Re-thinking How We Measure Homeownership, for a deeper dive into this issue.

An individual-level homeownership rate – the purple line above, showing the share of adults 25+ who are the household head, or the spouse of the household head, in an owner-occupied home – captures this trend more fully because it accounts for adults living in someone else’s owned home in a way that the household-level rate does not.¹ Today, more than 27 million adults over the age of 25 live in someone else’s owner-occupied home, whether it be a parent, a relative, a friend, or some other non-family member. The individual-level homeownership rate counts all of these adults in the denominator, whereas the household-level rate implicitly counts only the household heads. Because this group of non-homeowners living in owner-occupied homes has grown larger over time, the household-level and individual-level homeownership rates have gradually diverged – whereas the household-level rate is currently a tick higher than it was in the early 1990s, the individual-level rate has fallen to new lows over the past decade.

This divergence is especially prevalent among young adults. Today just 30 percent of adults between 25-34 are homeowners, reaching the lowest level since at least 1976, when the data first became available. In previous generations, these adults were buying homes, getting married, and starting families. But today, they are facing the housing market’s affordability challenges head-on, and increasingly living with others. In 2025, 30 percent of young adults were homeowners, while 50 percent lived in rentals, and the remaining 20 percent (totaling more than 9 million individuals) were living in someone else’s owned home.

The homeownership rate – both individual- and household-level – showed modest improvement in the second half of the 2010s and up through 2023, driven by historically low interest rates and a pandemic-era homebuying frenzy. But that frenzy swung the pendulum back, as home prices skyrocketed and interest rates increased, leading to modest price declines but a massive spike in the median monthly mortgage payment. This rapidly eroded affordability and locked out many would-be homebuyers, and consequently, the homeownership rate is trending down once again.