What Do Americans Spend on Housing?

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If there’s one thing that brings people together, it’s the ridiculously high cost of housing. Want to buy a place? Good luck with that. If you do luck into homeownership, enjoy those skyrocketing bills. In late April and May, WIRED asked readers how they’re thinking about homes in 2026. More than 200 people responded, sharing how they’re living and at what cost, how their towns have changed, and what compromises they've had to make.

Their top concern, by far? Affordability. The price of everyday goods. Their soaring utility bills. And of course, the biggest cost of all—housing itself. The famous “30 percent” rule, which suggests limiting your housing spend to a third of your income, is effectively moot. According to data released earlier this year, nearly half of all renters paid more than that in 2024, as did 24 percent of homeowners. (A quarter of all rental households spent more than half of their income on housing.)

Financial stress showed up in one answer after another. Here’s how a 35-year-old homeowner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, put it: “I’m finding it hard to dream of fun things. Nothing is affordable.” A 20-year-old who’s living with his parents in De Berry, Texas, has found the stress in his five-person household to be mounting. “There are tons of bills and we can’t afford them all,” he wrote. “There are too many stressors, and personality conflicts are intensifying.”

What people pay varies massively, of course, based on where they live and when they moved in. For people who bought homes in April, the median monthly mortgage was $2,152, while the median asking rent for the first quarter of 2026 was $1,579. The median asking price for a home, meanwhile, was $339,100.

Here are some of the striking archetypes that emerged from our questionnaire.

The Renter Who Has Given Up on Buying

No surprise: A large number of renters in WIRED’s survey expressed a strong desire to own a home. As Herbert Hoover once famously said, “They never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.” But several respondents said they felt locked in as “forever renters.” One 31-year-old tenant in Phoenix wrote, “I do not think I will ever be able to own a home or save the money for a down payment. I cry about it often.”

Of course, chasing your own white-picket fence might not be the wisest financial move. In January, LendingTree, a platform that facilitates loans, shared data showing that renting is cheaper than owning in every large urban area in the US. One respondent to WIRED’s survey, a 25-year-old in Boston, seemed to have internalized that home ownership isn’t always a sensible goal. “I do not expect to in the way that past generations seemed to,” she wrote. “Seems like more of an aspiration than the ‘assumed next step’ in an adult life.”

For four years—much of that Bostonian’s adult life—mortgage rates have remained predominantly above 6 percent while housing stock has been tight. But the pain has been building for decades. In the 1990s, the median house price was roughly 3.2 times the median income, whereas now it’s 5 times, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. House-buying conditions haven’t been this bad in decades: An analysis by First American Financial, per The Wall Street Journal, found that 2025 was the worst year for home sales since 1982.

“At this point, investing in real estate—given our ages, financial resources, and a terrifying, unstable global resource grid—would just be criminally foolish,” wrote a 51-year-old living in New Haven, Connecticut. But pragmatism couldn’t remove the sting of disappointment. She continued: “Knowing we will be confined to the same cheap rentals until we cannot be there anymore has, however, broken our hearts.”

Some of those forever renters might take heart in what homeowners have to say about their pain points.

The Owner Who’s Stressed About Bills and Climate

The toll of monthly bills is escalating, according to many homeowners in WIRED’s survey, especially for insurance and utilities. Respondents across the country say they are planning—or at least aspire—to improve the energy efficiency of their homes to offset their region’s deteriorating climate. A 62-year-old owner in Chandler, Arizona, wrote that “heat is getting worse, air-conditioning is coming on earlier in the year. We want to make changes to make our house more efficient.”

In Grass Valley, a California town near the Nevada border, a 46-year-old owner cited “out-of-control wildfires” for driving up home insurance rates and creating “months of edginess and terror at times if temperatures are high and there’s dry lightning and winds.” The owner wished for solar panels and fire-proof renovations—“anything to help us and our home to survive fire.” Others mentioned the arrival of invasive insect species and the loss of snowpack, which have meant less tourism. In Duncan, Oklahoma (population 23,238), a 55-year-old owner said that her family’s farmland is turning to desert. “It is now impossible to grow anything without a lot of expensive irrigation. We have about 5 months of over 90-degree high temps and frequent droughts.”

In Portland, Maine, a 35-year-old renter in the process of buying a home mentioned that the state’s climate initiatives are a reason to stay put. “We want to be able to garden, and to have more choices to invest in sustainable energy,” she wrote. “Especially now that fuel costs are skyrocketing.”

Residential electricity rates have spiked in the past year, with a nationwide average increase of 10 percent between March 2025 and March 2026. A huge factor has been the build-out of data centers. They’re not only straining the grid. As one Virginia resident noted, “Data centers have replaced all the trees.”

This story is part of The Future of Home, a collaboration between the editors of WIRED and Architectural Digest to help you understand what “home” will look like tomorrow and beyond.

The Resident Who’s Affected by Politics

It’s always trendy to dream of moving abroad; New Zealand, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, and (of course) Canada were among the desired locales in WIRED’s dataset. After the 2024 elections, one respondent sold his home in Salt Lake City and resettled in Dublin, Ireland.

It’s not at all dreamy when the government is the one who kicks you out. One 49-year-old has been living in Tijuana, Mexico, for the past six months because “after living for 22 years in California with family, I was deported with Trump enforcement.” He wrote that he’s now living in a studio, dealing with the loneliness and depression of being separated from his family.

Another respondent is a 45-year-old pursuing a master’s program in Seoul, while her husband is an immigrant living in the US. “I’ve been too scared to return there because of ICE and immigration stuff—it’s way too risky, and neither of us want to be responsible for being vanished.”

The Resident Who’s Bunking Down With Extended Family

Across the US, just under 5 percent of owner-occupied households span three or more generations. The number may sound modest, but according to data published in May by Realtor.com, demand for multigenerational homes is strong: Listings that included terms such as “granny flat” or “guest house” received more views and were priced higher (at an average of 22 percent more per square foot) than standard homes.

Multigenerational households were well represented in WIRED’s dataset, with respondents wanting to save money or help out aging parents. A 45-year-old from Oakley, California, is “living with relatives to avoid being homeless.” A 23-year-old from Decatur, Georgia, noted, “Any place I could afford at this point would be a downgrade compared to the experience I have staying with my parents.”

A retired 65-year-old from Columbia, Missouri, volunteered that her parents, now 91, moved in during Covid. Despite a lack of privacy, she wrote, “It’s been good! We don’t have any extra space, so we can't accumulate stuff, but we have all we need.” It’s not just the elderly moving in—a 38-year-old in Huntsville, Alabama, is preparing to sell her home to move back in with her parents.

With home sales trends remaining bleak, it’s no wonder that multigenerational living is common. According to an April 2026 report by the National Association of Realtors, only about one in five purchasers were first-time buyers—the lowest level on record.

The Resident Who Loves Their Offbeat Situation

Some respondents came up with inventive solutions to the housing crunch. A 47-year-old did so by building a 8- by 24-foot abode out of cold-formed steel on a giant plot of land where a Victorian had been torn down. “What would have been space to heat and cool is now a large amazing yard,” she wrote. A 68-year-old in Branchport, New York, lives in a one-bedroom log house with many animals: “I love living in the country, and having animals and large gardens.”

Another respondent—a 55-year-old in Santa Cruz, California—described the home she bought in 1998 as “a ramshackle dump.” But, she wrote, “We’ve spent our lives upgrading our home’s inside and outside spaces, making our once ugliest home on the block to the most beautiful,” a place surrounded by redwood trees and a mile from the Pacific Ocean.

Then there’s the maritime crowd. One 77-year-old who loves off-the-grid living has spent much of the last year on a sailboat. In Sausalito, California, an 84-year-old who “fell in love with living on a houseboat” noted that while onboard life is not easy for the elderly, she hoped to stay as long as she can. “I have everything I need and want here,” she wrote.

A 23-year-old in Decatur, Georgia, said they are “very open” to living in a tiny home or in multifamily housing. A 50-year-old in Seattle, meanwhile, hopes to sell his house, downsize to a condo, and live part-time in a camper van.

So what’s a home in this day and age? It might be, as that Seattleite put it, “where the bills find their way to me.”

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