Survey says younger buyers remain shut out of the housing market without outside help

The typical first-time homebuyer last year was still 40 years old, holding at a record high as younger buyers continue to face the hardest hit from elevated home prices and borrowing costs across much of the country.

New figures from the National Association of Realtors show the median age for first-time buyers has now been 40 for two straight years, after falling as low as 28 in 1991.

More first-time buyers are paying cash instead of using a mortgage, and those buyers are older still, with a typical age of 54, said Jessica Lautz, the association’s deputy chief economist and vice president of research. Such purchases often reflect inheritances or other family support.

“That’s actually 1 in 10 first-time buyers, so we’re really seeing that generational transfer of wealth,” Lautz said of cash offers. Repeat buyers also reached a median age of 62, another record, according to the report.

Near San Francisco, prices continue to climb because of the AI boom, Lautz said, while some Rust Belt regions and states that are building large numbers of homes are seeing more manageable costs.

A realtor.com report ranked Indiana, Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina and Nebraska highest for affordability and homebuilding rates, using a mix of home prices relative to income and new building permits.

At the other end of the list were New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Hawaii and California.

Including cash purchases is one reason the National Association of Realtors’ homebuyer survey shows a higher median age than other data sets, such as the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s review of mortgage applications, Lautz said.

The Federal Reserve puts the median age of first-time buyers at 33 for the first six months of 2026, said Yanling Mayer, a research economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. That is roughly unchanged from 2019, while the Realtors’ survey, which includes cash buyers, shows the median age rising from 33 in 2019 to 40 over the past two years.

“We’re certainly not brushing aside the challenges facing first-time homebuyers,” Mayer said. “Are they finding other means to achieve home ownership? Help from family, help from friends?”

Several surveys last year also placed first-time buyers in the 35-to-40 age range and pointed to an aging trend, said Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research for John Burns Research and Consulting.

“The answer is probably somewhere in the middle,” Finnigan said.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at [email protected].

This story was originally produced by Stateline, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes Michigan Advance and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.