Roughly one in three Americans under 35 now sleeps under a parent’s roof. A Realtor.com report released in June 2026 counted 25.2 million of them in 2025, the most ever recorded and more than at the height of the pandemic, when closed campuses sent young adults home to wait things out.
Laziness does not explain it. About 70% of the 25-to-34-year-olds living at home have jobs, and a growing share hold four-year degrees. Realtor.com senior economist Hannah Jones called it a supply story, not an employment story.
Too few homes, too high a price
The country is short about 4 million homes, a hole that has been growing since building stalled after the 2008 financial crisis. Starter homes are the scarcest of all.
Prices did the rest. The median list price for a home reached $430,000 in 2025, up 34.4% from 2019. Median asking rent rose 17.9% in the same stretch to $1,673. Pay has not kept up. First-time buyers made up only 21% of the market, the smallest share since the National Association of Realtors began tracking it in 1981, and the typical one is 40.
Jessica Lautz, the association’s deputy chief economist, points out that people who buy later lose years of potential home equity, and that the gap keeps compounding through their financial lives.
Who is hit hardest
Adults aged 30 to 34 show the sharpest change. In 2025, 12.7% of them lived with parents, against 7.1% in 2000. Many were in their late twenties when the pandemic hit and never quite got out on their own. The group right behind them reached prime renting age just as mortgage rates and prices jumped in 2022 and 2023, so their numbers have not improved either.
Geography tracks cost closely, according to the 2024 American Community Survey. New Jersey leads at about 44%, then Connecticut at 41%, California at 39% and Maryland at 38%. North Dakota, where building is easier, has the lowest share at about 12%.
Parents feel it too
A 2026 Wells Fargo survey of parents with Gen Z children found that 64% said their grown kids still lean on them for money, housing or other support. Some 56% said that help strains their own finances. Many are putting off plans to downsize and are carrying the larger mortgage, taxes and utility bills that come with a bigger house.
Agents say they are fielding a question that used to be rare: can one home comfortably hold three generations?
The share of under-35s at home, 33%, sits just under the 33.6% peak of 2020, but the head count is higher than it has ever been. The share dipped briefly in 2022, when a narrow group caught record-low mortgage rates, and then climbed again as rates, prices and rents stayed high.
Realtor.com treats the 25 million as demand the market has yet to absorb. Each adult in a childhood bedroom is a household not yet formed. The report says the states where young people move out earliest are those where building is easier and a paycheck goes further.
