Forty-nine percent of Americans under 30 lived with a parent in 2025. That is 12 percentage points higher than in 2019, the year before the pandemic, and six points above 2022, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.
Housing is the obvious culprit. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies puts existing home prices up 54 percent nationwide since 2020. Median prices for new and existing homes now sit above $400,000, about five times the median income; in the 1990s the ratio was closer to three. With mortgage rates above 6 percent, the monthly payment on a median-priced home hit $3,100 in the fourth quarter of 2025, against $1,700 in early 2020. Affording that comfortably takes an income above $120,000, where five years earlier $66,000 would do.
Renters are not spared. The Fed’s survey data show median rent up 20 percent between 2022 and 2025.
Money from outside the household
Forty-seven percent of adults aged 18 to 29 said someone outside their household had given them financial help in the past year. The money mostly went to phone bills, everyday expenses, and rent, mortgage or utilities, with car payments and insurance also common. It was a new question in the 2025 survey, so there is no trend to compare against.
Young adults reported worse finances than the population as a whole. Some 63 percent of those aged 18 to 29 said they were doing okay or living comfortably, down from 66 percent a year earlier; for all adults the figure was 73 percent, roughly unchanged since 2022. Twenty-four percent of under-30s had not paid all their bills in full the previous month, against 16 percent across all ages. They were also about twice as likely as adults 30 and older to name finding or keeping a job as a major worry.
What economists say
Grace Zwemmer, an analyst at Oxford Economics, ties the trend to a weak job market and rising housing costs. Her firm’s research found unemployment among young adults rising in November 2025, with the U.S. hiring rate down to 3.2 percent, well below its historical average. She estimates that about 1 million more adults aged 22 to 28 live with their parents than pre-pandemic patterns would predict, and that each spends more than $12,000 a year less than peers who have moved out.
Staying home is not free, either. Pew Research found that 72 percent of young adults living with parents contribute to household bills.
Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com, sees two groups. “A genuine launchpad cohort with higher incomes and lower debt who will convert to buyers when conditions allow,” she said, “and a larger group for whom the childhood bedroom is less a runway and more a floor.”
Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an economics professor at Boston College, wrote that students are graduating with heavy education debt into a weak entry-level job market. A brief from the college’s Center for Retirement Research found that states with higher real rents and lower vacancy rates had significantly more young adults at home. Had 2007 rental conditions held today, parental co-residence would be 1.5 percent lower for women and 2.1 percent lower for men. He noted that young people living with parents are less likely to marry or have children and build less wealth, especially in housing.
Sources
- Nearly Half of Adults Under 30 Live with Their Parents. The Financial Fallout Could Last for Decades.
- Nearly Half of Americans Under 30 Live With a Parent. Here’s How They’re Doing Financially – AOL
Sources
- Nearly Half of Adults Under 30 Live with Their Parents. The Financial…
- Nearly Half of Americans Under 30 Live With a Parent. – AOL
