New homeownership measure puts people first

An alternative way of calculating the homeownership rate tells us how many individuals own their homes—something the most commonly used metric fails to track

by Erik Hembre, Ben Horowitz, and Maxine Xu, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, July 15, 2026 (excerpts)

The homeownership rate in the United States is reported to be 65 percent. But this commonly cited data point on homeownership is actually the owner-occupancy rate, which tells us how many housing units are occupied by an owner. While owner occupancy is an interesting measure, it doesn’t tell us how many people own their home. As an alternative to better reflect the share of adults who are homeowners, we offer the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, a measure that lends a more nuanced view for important policy considerations and context. Using this new measure, the U.S. homeownership rate is 53 percent….

To continue our examination of housing costs and homeownership, consider the implications for two states: Hawaii and North Dakota. Hawaii…is nearly the least affordable state, as measured by its rent-to-income ratio of 0.57. Consistent with the idea that higher housing costs might discourage adults from forming their own households, Hawaii’s HPOP is 18.9 percentage points lower than its owner-occupancy rate, the largest difference of any state.

On the other hand, North Dakota…is the most affordable state in the nation by rent-to-income ratio. As we might expect, it has the smallest difference between its owner-occupancy rate and its HPOP. This small difference reflects, for example, how few adults under age 35 co-reside with parents in North Dakota. Only 10 percent of North Dakota’s young adults live with a parent, compared to the national average of 30 percent. While the gap between the two homeownership measures is more than 10 percentage points for the majority of states, in North Dakota the difference is just 3.9 percentage points. As a result, North Dakota’s homeownership ranking among the 50 states rises from forty-seventh to twenty-fourth when using the HPOP instead of the owner-occupancy rate.…

The new measure could … allow researchers to consider the long-term financial implications for young adults who spend more time living in the households of their homeowner parents….

read … New homeownership measure puts people first | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

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A: Homeownership rate in the U.S. is lower than you think, new research finds