Housing
Home prices, rent costs, and mortgage rates tracked across decades. Housing is the single largest expense for most American families, and its trajectory tells a powerful story about wealth, inequality, and the shifting cost of the American Dream.
Median Home Prices
The median sale price of existing single-family homes in the United States from 1950 to 2025. Homeownership has long been the primary wealth-building vehicle for American families, and tracking median prices over 75 years reveals just how dramatically the landscape has shifted. From the post-war housing boom through the 2008 crash and the frenzied pandemic market, this dataset captures the full arc of the nation's most consequential asset class.
Median Rent Prices
There's no quicker way to feel the squeeze of inflation than watching your rent bill climb year after year. This dataset tracks the median monthly rent for unfurnished apartments across the United States from 1950 to 2025. Back in the early '50s, $42 a month could land you a decent place — today that won't even cover a parking spot in most cities. The post-2020 surge has been especially brutal, with rents jumping over 35% in just five years as housing supply failed to keep pace with demand.
30-Year Mortgage Rates
If you've ever wondered why your parents talk about their 16% mortgage like it was a war story, this dataset tells the whole tale. It tracks the average annual 30-year fixed mortgage rate from 1971 to 2025, covering everything from the Volcker-era shock therapy that pushed rates past 18% in 1981 to the pandemic-era lows that let buyers lock in under 3%. Mortgage rates don't just affect monthly payments — they reshape entire housing markets, determine who can afford to buy, and drive refinancing waves that ripple through the broader economy.
Property Tax Rates
The average annual property tax bill on a single-family home in the United States from 1960 to 2025. If you own a home, you know this one stings — it's the bill that never stops growing, even after you've paid off the mortgage. Back in 1960, homeowners shelled out about $292 a year. Today it's north of $4,100, a 14x increase that's outpaced both wages and general inflation. Rising home valuations and expanding local government budgets have kept the pressure on, and the post-pandemic reassessment wave pushed bills to record highs in most counties.
Homeowners Insurance
Average annual homeowners insurance premiums in the United States from 1970 to 2025. For decades, this was one of those bills you barely noticed — $98 a year in 1970 wasn't exactly breaking the bank. But the last few years have been a different story entirely. Climate-driven disasters, soaring rebuild costs, and insurers fleeing high-risk states have sent premiums through the roof. The average policy now runs over $2,000 a year, and in states like Florida and Louisiana, plenty of homeowners are paying two or three times that.
Average New Home Size
Average square footage of newly built single-family homes in the United States from 1960 to 2025. Americans spent half a century building bigger and bigger houses — the typical new home nearly doubled from 1,289 sq ft in 1960 to a peak of 2,467 sq ft in 2015. Then something shifted. Affordability pressures, smaller household sizes, and rising construction costs started pushing builders toward more modest footprints. By 2025, the average new home has shrunk back to about 2,170 sq ft, and the McMansion era looks increasingly like a historical blip.
Construction Costs
Average cost per square foot for new residential construction in the United States from 1970 to 2025. Building a house used to be remarkably cheap — just $16 per square foot in 1970, which meant a 1,500 sq ft home ran about $24,000 in construction costs alone. Today that same square foot costs $202, and lumber price spikes, labor shortages, and supply chain chaos have made the last five years especially painful. The pandemic era saw construction costs jump 37% between 2019 and 2025, adding tens of thousands to the price of every new home.
Home Improvement Spending
Average annual household spending on home improvements and repairs in the United States from 1980 to 2025. Americans have always loved a good renovation project, but the dollars involved have gotten serious. The typical homeowner spent about $1,250 a year in 1980 — enough to redo a bathroom on a budget. By 2022, that figure had ballooned to $7,400, fueled by pandemic-era nesting, HGTV culture, and aging housing stock that simply needed the work. The slight pullback since then reflects higher interest rates making home equity loans pricier, but spending remains historically elevated.
Housing Starts
Annual new privately-owned housing starts in the United States from 1960 to 2025, measured in thousands of units. This is one of the most telling indicators of where the housing market's headed — when builders are breaking ground, it means they're betting on demand. The early 1970s saw a construction frenzy with over 2.3 million starts in 1972, a record that still stands. The 2008 crash brought the industry to its knees, with starts plummeting to just 554,000 in 2009. The recovery's been painfully slow, and we still haven't gotten back to pre-crash building levels.
Average Down Payment
Average down payment on existing homes sold in the United States from 1980 to 2025. Here's the number that keeps first-time buyers up at night. In 1980, scraping together $7,800 for a down payment was tough but doable on a middle-class salary. Fast forward to 2025, and buyers need an average of $58,500 upfront — a 7.5x increase that's far outpaced wage growth. The pandemic-era home price surge made things dramatically worse, with the average down payment jumping nearly $20,000 between 2019 and 2022 alone. It's the single biggest barrier to homeownership for younger Americans.