Real Estate News & Market Insights:
- Median homeowner age rose significantly to 57.5 years, reflecting older owners staying in place longer and younger buyers delayed.
- First-time buyer age climbed to a record 40 in 2025, signaling later entry into homeownership for younger cohorts.
- Affordability gap driven by stagnant incomes, high home prices, elevated mortgage rates, rents, and debt blocks younger buyers.
- Market impact fewer millennial and Gen Z buyers reduce sales, slow turnover, and widen the housing supply gap.
While the U.S. homeownership rate has hardly budged in more than a decade, the median age of American homeowners has grown considerably older as younger buyers find themselves locked out of the market.
In 2024, the median age of homeowners climbed to 57.5 years, up from 54 years recorded in 2010, even as the share of households owning homes remained just slightly above 65%, according to a new data analysis from the National Association of Realtors®.
Nadia Evangelou, principal economist and director of real estate research at NAR, contends that this demographic shift has profound implications for the housing market and who realistically can afford to enter it.
“Younger households are entering ownership more slowly or later in life, while existing owners are staying longer,” explains Evangelou. “So even though the homeownership rate hasn’t changed much since 2010, the people who own a home have.”
This dynamic becomes particularly apparent when comparing homeownership rates by age group.
Between 2010 and 2014, rates declined across every prime buying-age cohort, including 25 to 34 years old, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, and 55 to 64. Only households 65 years and older saw their homeownership rate tick up, reaching 78.7%—well above the national median.
The reason for this, according to Evangelou, is that the 65-plus population has exploded since 2010, growing by millions of households as the U.S. continues to age.
“In other words, older households are not just owning at high rates—there are many more of them,” explains Evangelou. “That combination helps explain why the overall homeownership rate looks stable even though it’s harder for younger households to buy a home.”
Younger buyers are sidelined
In fact, NAR’s annual profile of homebuyers and home sellers released in November found that the median age of first-time buyers climbed to 40 in 2025, a record high, up from 38 the year before.
Evangelou attributes this trend to a combination of factors, including the fact that first-time homebuyers today earn roughly 30% less than the income needed to afford a typical starter home, coupled with the vanishing supply of entry-level housing options.
“The biggest hurdle is the gap between income growth and housing costs,” Tania Jhayem, a real estate agent at Keller Williams The Marketplace‘s luxury division in Las Vegas, tells Realtor.com®. “Home prices rose significantly over the past several years, and mortgage rates remain more elevated than the record-low levels many older homeowners were able to lock in during 2020 and 2021.”
As a result, younger would-be buyers end up renting longer and delaying homeownership, while older owners stay in their homes longer, resulting in the national rate keeping steady, at 65.3%.
Beyond high home prices, younger Americans are having to contend with high rents making it more difficult to save up for a down payment, and the lingering weight of student and consumer debt further eroding buying power.
“I truly believe that for many millennials, the barrier to becoming a first-time homebuyer is not for lack of desire or ambition; it’s just the widening gaps between income growth, their debts, and housing costs,” Christopher Raad, owner of Harvey Z. Raad Realtors in Allentown, PA, tells Realtor.com. “It’s unfortunate but we see so many younger buyers carrying large amounts of debt, be it student loan, car, or credit cards.”
Jhayem points out that under these conditions, for many young adults, staying at home is “a strategic financial decision rather than a lack of independence.”
Together, these persistent affordability headwinds have essentially erased more than 1.8 million millennial and Gen Z buyers from the market.
As the U.S. housing supply gap widened to 4.03 million units in 2025, more than 1.8 million would-be home shoppers ages 18 to 44 found themselves barred from entry into homeownership.
Owen Canavan, affiliate broker with Miracle LLC, says the consequences of Gen Z and millennial buyers being left on the sidelines could be far-reaching.
“The reduction of Gen Z and millennial buyers reduces market activity at large, especially when historically they made up a large portion of the first-time homebuyer pool,” Canavan tells Realtor.com. “Its effect contributes to fewer home sales overall, slowing turnover and market fluidity.”
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