In 2025, a record 25.2 million adults under age 35 were living with their parents in the United States — about one in three, or a 33.0% co-residence rate. That’s the highest raw number ever recorded, even surpassing the pandemic-era peak, according to a new Realtor.com report. The driver isn’t unemployment; it’s a housing shortage that has kept home prices and rents far above pre-pandemic levels.
The Numbers at a Glance
- 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with a parent in 2025 — an all-time high
- 33.0% co-residence rate among adults under 35, just below the 2020 record of 33.6%
- $430,000 median national home listing price, up 34.4% from 2019
- $1,673 median asking rent, up 17.9% from 2019
- 4 million homes — the estimated national housing deficit
- 4.86 million fewer young adults would be living at parent’s home if early-2000s patterns still held
- 40 — the age of the typical first-time homebuyer today
Why So Many Young Adults Are Still at Parent’s Home
The story isn’t about young people failing to launch. It’s about a market that hasn’t built enough homes to launch into.
Realtor.com senior economist Hannah Jones put it directly: the adults living with their parents “are largely employed, and many hold college degrees. What’s holding them back isn’t a lack of qualifications, but rather, at least in part, a lack of housing they can actually afford.” In her words, “This is a supply story, not an employment story.”
The data backs that up. Roughly 70% of adults aged 25 to 34 living at home are employed. Back in 2000, about one in nine adults in their late 20s were employed and living at home; by 2025, that had climbed to nearly one in seven — even though employment rates in that group barely moved. Something other than jobs is keeping them home, and that something is housing costs.
A Decade-Plus of Underbuilding
The roots of this trend go back further than the pandemic. Housing construction slowed sharply after the 2008 financial crisis and never fully caught up. Housing starts have recently fallen to six-year lows, and new construction continues to lag population and household growth.
Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that household formation — a key driver of housing demand — slowed for a third straight year in 2025, dropping from an average of 2.0 million new households per year in 2021 to just 1.1 million in 2025. Weak labor markets for young workers, heavy student debt, and general economic uncertainty are all cited as contributing factors, layered on top of the affordability crunch.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner has also pointed to regulatory hurdles as a factor slowing new housing supply.
Two Decades of Crisis, Spike, and a Higher Floor
Co-residence rates don’t move in a straight line — they follow a pattern of shocks that never fully unwind:
- The Great Recession pushed co-residence rates up, and they never returned to pre-recession levels.
- COVID-19 drove the rate to 33.6% in 2020, an all-time high at the time.
- 2022 brought a brief dip, but only for a narrow slice of young adults who managed to lock in historically low mortgage rates before the window closed.
- Everyone after that window faced higher rates, tight inventory, and rising rents — and by 2025, the raw number of adults at home had climbed past the 2020 peak.
Who’s Living at Home, Exactly
The demographic picture has shifted meaningfully over the past 25 years:
- Marital status: About 9 in 10 adults aged 25–34 living with parents have never been married, up from 79% in 2000 — a sign of delayed household formation, not just delayed homebuying.
- Education: Roughly 1 in 3 adults aged 25–29 living at home hold a four-year degree, up from fewer than 1 in 4 in 2000.
- Gender: Men remain the majority of at-home adults at every age, but the gap is narrowing among younger cohorts. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, the split is now nearly even at 51.5% male, versus a 55/45 split in 2000.
The Cohort Story: 25–29 vs. 30–34
Breaking the data down by age tells a more nuanced story:
- Ages 25–29 have seen a modest pullback from recent highs. This group includes adults who were in their early 20s during the low-rate window of 2020–2021 and managed to find footing before the market tightened. Those just behind them — now 25 to 26 — hit peak renting age right as rates and prices spiked in 2022–2023, and haven’t seen the same relief.
- Ages 30–34 hit 12.7% co-residence in 2025, nearly double the 7.1% rate in 2000. This group largely consists of people who were 25 to 29 during the pandemic and never fully moved out.
In short: it’s the same generational cohort, aging through the same delayed launch at different life stages.
What This Means for the Housing Market
Every adult still living in a childhood bedroom represents, in Jones’s words, “a household not formed, a lease unsigned, a starter home unpurchased.” That’s 25.2 million people representing pent-up housing demand the market simply hasn’t absorbed.
There’s also a real financial cost to the delay. Every year spent at home instead of renting or buying is a year of deferred wealth-building — equity not accumulated, credit not built, savings not compounded the way homeownership can enable.
Until entry-level housing supply expands and affordability improves, that latent demand isn’t going anywhere. It will keep building, year after year, until the market finally catches up.
Bottom Line
One in three adults under 35 living with a parent isn’t a story about a generation unwilling to grow up. It’s a story about more than a decade of housing underproduction colliding with rising prices and rents — leaving millions of employed, educated young adults with nowhere affordable to go. Until the U.S. closes its roughly 4-million-home supply gap, expect this record to keep climbing.
Are you thinking of buying or selling a home in the South Florida area? We can help! Contact Natasha at Live South Florida Realty, Inc. today! Also, be sure to download the free Florida Home Search App for your smartphone or tablet.
