The U.S. housing market is typically described through a national homeownership rate that has held near 65% in recent federal data. A new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis narrowed that picture on July 21 by arguing that the standard figure overstates how many individual Americans actually own a home. The report found that 53% of U.S. adults own the homes they live in, roughly 12 percentage points below the commonly cited rate.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis introduces a lower homeownership measure
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis published the new measure this week, calling it the Homeownership of People, or HPOP, and said it is designed to count people rather than housing units. According to the bank’s analysis of 2024 American Community Survey microdata, 53% of American adults owned the home where they lived. The standard Census-based figure, by contrast, tracks the share of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied and has recently stood around 65%.
The difference is significant because multiple adults can live in an owner-occupied home without each being an owner. The Minneapolis Fed said the traditional measure is better understood as an owner-occupancy rate, not a direct count of how many adults own homes. That distinction helps explain why the two numbers can diverge so sharply even when both are drawn from national housing data.
Coverage by The Washington Post and Axios said the new measure could reshape how policymakers and economists discuss access to homeownership, especially among younger adults and people living in shared households. The Census Bureau’s first-quarter 2026 housing data, released in April, put the national homeownership rate at 65.3%, underscoring how different the older metric remains from the new people-based calculation.
Because the new measure focuses on adults rather than households, it changes the picture in places where adult children, extended family members or unrelated adults share homes with an owner. The Minneapolis Fed said that in high-cost states and metro areas, the gap between owner-occupancy and person-level homeownership can be especially noticeable. The report did not release a single nationwide list ranking every state in the summary article, and a comprehensive state-by-state public table was not included in the material reviewed.
What is confirmed is that the nationwide gap between the traditional measure and the HPOP measure is 12.2 percentage points. The bank also said large, expensive states such as California, New York and Hawaii show smaller but still meaningful differences between owner-occupancy rates and the new person-based measure, with gaps of 8.9, 6.0 and 10.1 percentage points, respectively. That suggests the national shortfall is not limited to one region.
For residents, the revised measure may better reflect day-to-day reality in markets where several adults live under one roof but only one or two names are on the deed or mortgage. It does not change legal ownership records or Census reporting, but it does present a more restrictive estimate of how widely ownership is distributed among adults.
The cause of the gap is methodological first: the Census Bureau measures homes, while the Minneapolis Fed measure counts adults. But the broader housing market helps explain why more adults may be living in owner-occupied homes without owning them. Census reporting in 2025 showed rising monthly owner costs, and Reuters reported this month that single-family construction and permits weakened as elevated mortgage rates and affordability pressures continued to weigh on the market.
Those financial conditions have made it harder for first-time buyers to purchase homes on their own, according to housing research cited by the Bipartisan Policy Center and other analysts. As affordability worsens, more adults remain renters, live with parents, share homes with relatives, or live in households where another person is the sole owner. The HPOP measure captures that reality more directly than the traditional owner-occupied housing rate.
For readers, the practical takeaway is that the commonly cited 65% figure still describes housing units, while the new 53% figure describes adults. Both numbers are based on real housing data, but they answer different questions. The Minneapolis Fed said the newer measure may offer a clearer picture of economic well-being and access to ownership as housing costs remain elevated.