Home Price Statistics (2026)

The typical American home has never cost more. The median existing-home sale price hit a record $440,600 in June 2026, according to the National Association of Realtors, while a new home sold for a median of $424,900 in May, per the Census Bureau (see the table below).

June marked the 35th consecutive month of year-over-year price gains, an unbroken run since 2023. Prices are still setting records even as the pace of increase has slowed to a crawl, a sign the market is expensive but no longer surging.

For decades a new home commanded a premium over an existing one. That has flipped. By early 2026 new homes were selling at roughly a 5% discount to existing homes, an unusual inversion, as builders cut prices and added incentives to move inventory while existing owners held firm.

The Census/HUD new-home median was $424,900 in May 2026, and the FRED MSPUS quarterly series read $403,200 in Q1 2026, down about 4.7% year over year. Builder discounting is one of the few forces actively pulling median prices down.

The headline story of 2026 is deceleration. The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller US National index rose just 0.8% in the year to April 2026, and national prices are up only about 0.3% over the entire past six months (see the table below). That is the weakest appreciation since prices recovered from the 2008 crash.

The FHFA purchase-only index was a touch firmer at 2.0% year over year, and NAR's median was up 1.3% in May. All three agree on the direction: home-price growth has stalled to a near-flatline under the weight of high mortgage rates and stretched affordability.

Two indices dominate home-price tracking, and they measure slightly different things. Case-Shiller uses repeat sales of the same homes in 20 major metros and tends to be more volatile; the FHFA index draws on conforming mortgages nationwide and is smoother.

In April 2026 Case-Shiller's 10-city composite (+1.8%) ran hotter than its 20-city (+1.1%) and national (+0.8%) gauges, because the pricey coastal-and-Midwest cities in the 10-city index held up better than Sun Belt markets. NAR's median, by contrast, tracks the actual sale price and can jump around with the mix of homes sold.

There is no single US housing market in 2026, there are dozens moving in opposite directions. Chicago led all Case-Shiller metros at +6.5% year over year in April, with New York (+3.8%) and Cleveland (+3.2%) close behind, as tight inventory in the Northeast and affordable Midwest kept demand firm (see the chart and table below).

At the other end, formerly red-hot Sun Belt and Mountain West markets cooled outright: Seattle (-2.3%), Denver (-1.8%), Tampa (-1.8%), and Phoenix (-1.7%) all fell, and FHFA had Austin down 6.9%. The pandemic boomtowns are giving back some of their gains.

California owns the top of the price ladder. San Jose is the most expensive US metro by a wide margin, with a median single-family price of $2.03 million in Q1 2026, followed by Anaheim ($1.44M) and San Francisco ($1.35M), per NAR (see the table below).

Eight of the ten priciest metros are in California, with Honolulu and Naples, Florida rounding out the list. In these markets even a starter home routinely tops seven figures, which is why the coasts drive so much of the national affordability debate.

Affordability still exists, mostly in the Midwest and Rust Belt. Pittsburgh is the most affordable large metro, with homes costing about 3.07 times median income, followed by Cleveland (3.27) and Detroit (3.62), per a secondary price-to-income analysis (flagged).

Texas and Southern metros like Dallas (3.95), Houston (4.14), Atlanta (4.03), and Chicago (4.28) also rank among the nation's 20 most affordable. The catch: even these bargain markets sit well above the 2.6 ratio that housing economists consider healthy.

Zoom out and the trajectory is staggering. The median new-home price was about $23,400 in 1970 and roughly $122,900 in 1990; by 2000 it was near $165,300, and it crossed $336,900 in 2020 (see the chart below, older figures approximate).

Prices then peaked around $454,900 in 2022 before easing back to $403,200 by Q1 2026. Over the full half-century the median home has risen more than seventeenfold in nominal terms, far outpacing general inflation and, in many decades, wage growth.

The current affordability crisis was born in 2020-2022. Ultra-low mortgage rates, remote work, and scarce inventory sent prices vertical: Case-Shiller posted roughly 19% national appreciation in 2021, the fastest on record, and the median new home jumped from about $337,000 in 2020 to $455,000 by 2022.

Prices never meaningfully retraced. Instead they plateaued at a permanently higher level while mortgage rates more than doubled, locking in the affordability squeeze that still defines the 2026 market.

The cleanest measure of how stretched housing is compares price to income. The national home-price-to-income ratio is about 5.08, nearly double the 2.6 level often cited as the ceiling for a healthy market, and none of the 50 largest metros meets that threshold (see the chart and table below, secondary analysis).

The West is the epicenter: San Jose sits at 11.65, Los Angeles at 9.75, and San Francisco at 9.62, meaning a home costs roughly a decade of the median household's entire pre-tax income. Even the cheapest big metro, Pittsburgh, is above the recommended ratio.

NAR's Housing Affordability Index put the reading at 113.7 in March 2026, meaning a median-income family earned about 14% more than needed to qualify for a median-priced home with 20% down (100 = exactly enough). That is far below the 150-plus readings common in the 2010s.

The dollars are unforgiving: qualifying for the median home took about $93,696 of income in February 2026, and the monthly payment ran near $1,979, eating 21.5% of a typical family's income (see the table below). First-time buyers putting 10% down spent about 32.5% of income, deep into cost-burdened territory.

Rates are the hidden lever behind everything. The 30-year fixed averaged 6.55% in mid-July 2026, down from the 8% peak of 2023 but still more than double the sub-3% rates of 2021 (Freddie Mac).

That gap creates a lock-in effect: millions of owners holding 3% mortgages will not sell into a 6.5% market, which starves inventory and props up prices even as demand weakens. It is a big reason home prices have stayed high despite the affordability crunch.

High prices and high rates have frozen transaction volume. Existing-home sales ran at a 4.09 million annualized pace in June 2026, near the lowest levels in three decades, with 4.6 months of supply (see the table below). A balanced market is usually 5-6 months.

Inventory is slowly rebuilding as the lock-in effect eases and new listings return, which is part of why price growth has stalled. More homes for sale plus stretched buyers equals the flat-to-slightly-positive price picture of 2026.

For most households a home is the single largest asset, and 2026 is a reminder that it is not a guaranteed one-way bet: appreciation has flatlined, and some metros are falling. A house delivers use value and forced savings, but its price can stagnate for years, as it did after 2006.

For portfolio purposes, treat home equity as a large, illiquid, geographically concentrated position, not a substitute for diversified financial assets. Real estate exposure can also be gotten in liquid form through REITs and housing-related equities, which trade daily and spread the bet across regions rather than staking it on one address.