First-Time Home Buyer Statistics (2026)

First-time buyers made up 21% of home purchases in the year to June 2025. That is the lowest share since the National Association of Realtors started asking in 1981.

Before 2008, first-time buyers were about 40% of the market. The share has roughly halved.

This is the single most important number in US housing right now, because the first-time buyer is the entry point to the whole ownership ladder. A market that is 79% repeat buyers is a market recycling existing owners.

The median age of a first-time buyer reached 40, the highest ever recorded in the series.

In the 1980s the typical first-time buyer was in their late 20s. That is a shift of more than a decade in a single working lifetime.

The financial consequence is a shorter mortgage runway. A 30-year loan taken at 40 runs to 70, which changes the retirement planning arithmetic for an entire cohort.

Repeat buyers have a median age of 62, the highest in the report's history, and half of them are older than that.

They put down a median of 23% and 30% of them paid cash outright, financing nothing.

NAR's own framing is that the market is divided between an all-time high of all-cash buyers and an all-time low of first-time buyers. Those are not two facts. They are the same fact from both ends.

First-time buyers put down a median of 10%, matching the highest share recorded since 1989. Repeat buyers put down 23%, the highest since 2003.

Both rose, which tells you the market is selecting for buyers with more capital rather than loosening.

The 10% figure also settles a common misconception: the median first-time buyer is not putting 20% down, and never has been in recent decades.

59% of first-time buyers used personal savings for the down payment. 26% used financial assets such as a 401(k), IRA or stocks. 22% received a gift or loan from a friend or relative.

NAR notes that in past years a gift or loan was more common among first-time buyers than financial assets. That has now reversed.

For an investor this is the most consequential line in the report. A quarter of first-time buyers are funding a deposit out of a portfolio, which means the timing of a house purchase is now entangled with the timing of a market.

First-time buyers who did succeed cite high rent and student loans as the two foremost costs holding back their saving.

Childcare expenses appear as a steady barrier to saving for a down payment.

Mortgage rates averaged 6.69% during the survey period, against extremely limited inventory that NAR describes as often arriving at unaffordable price points.

Among first-time buyers, 50% are married couples, 25% are single women and 10% are single men.

Single women buy at two and a half times the rate of single men among first-time buyers, a gap that has been persistent in this survey for years.

Across all buyers the mix is 61% married couples, 21% single women and 9% single men.

Only 24% of home buyers had children under 18 in the household, an all-time low in the series.

NAR attributes this to falling birth rates and to the rise of older repeat buyers, which are two different mechanisms pointing the same way.

It matters for what gets built and bought. A market of older buyers without children at home is a market with different requirements from the one housing policy is usually designed around.

The top neighbourhood factors across all buyers are quality of the neighbourhood at 59% and convenience to friends and family at 47%.

Convenience to the buyer's job has fallen to 31%, down from 52% in 2014.

That decline continued between 2024 and 2025 even as return-to-office mandates became more common, which is a genuine tension in the data rather than a tidy story.

The leading reason repeat buyers gave for purchasing was the desire to be closer to friends and family, at 19%.

With a median repeat-buyer age of 62, this is a market increasingly shaped by proximity decisions rather than by job relocation.

Sellers had owned their home for an all-time high of 11 years before selling, so each transaction now represents a longer accumulation of equity than it used to.

The typical buyer searched for 10 weeks, unchanged from the previous year.

Buyers continue to report that the most difficult part of the process is finding the right home to buy, which follows directly from constrained inventory.

Despite that, 92% of buyers said they were satisfied with the buying process, and 88% purchased through an agent or broker.

Lowest first-time buyer share since 1981. Highest first-time buyer age recorded. Highest repeat buyer age in the report's history. Highest all-cash share. Lowest share of buyers with children. Highest seller tenure. Lowest for-sale-by-owner share, at 5%.

A survey that produces this many simultaneous records is describing a structural shift rather than a cyclical one.

The common thread is capital. Every record points toward a market that increasingly rewards buyers who already own assets.

The median first-time deposit is 10%, not 20%, so a plan built around the 20% figure is aiming at a target the typical buyer does not hit.

A quarter of first-time buyers now fund the deposit partly from investments, which makes the horizon question sharper: money needed within a few years generally should not carry equity risk.

And the age data argues for planning around a later purchase than previous generations made, which affects how long the mortgage runs and how it interacts with retirement saving.

This is a survey, not a census of transactions. NAR mailed 173,250 questionnaires in July 2025 and received 6,103 usable responses from primary-residence buyers, an adjusted response rate of 3.5%.

The confidence interval is plus or minus 1.25% at the 95% level, and the median is the primary statistic used throughout.

The data covers primary residences only, so investment and vacation purchases are excluded. Income data is reported for 2024 while everything else covers the 12 months to June 2025.

Every figure is from the National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, published 4 November 2025 and covering transactions from July 2024 to June 2025.

NAR is primary for this data. It designs and fields the survey itself and has published the series annually since 1981, which makes it the longest consistent record of US buyer behaviour that exists.

Figures are quoted with attribution to NAR.