Has your income, or your household’s income, doubled over the last half a dozen years?
Maybe. But probably not. Even considering the post-pandemic macro environment, which featured some of the briskest annual wage increases in decades.
If you (or you and your spouse) aren’t earning twice what you earned on the eve of the pandemic and you don’t already own a home, it’s a problem.
Because guess what? The annual income needed to comfortably afford the “typical” US home has doubled since 2020, or nearly so.
There’s the chart. You’ve probably seen some version of it before, perhaps in these pages, perhaps elsewhere. It uses Redfin’s excellent collection of housing market data.
The good news is, this particular metric — which references the standard 30% rule to define “comfortably afford” — has actually fallen for seven straight months.
The bad news is… well, it’s obvious, right? In April of 2020, a family making less than $61,000 per year could’ve taken out a mortgage with a 15% downpayment on the median US home and spent 30% or less of their income on their monthly housing payment. That figure in April of 2026, a mere six years later, was $116,780.
As the chart shows, the peak was $121,927 in May of 2024. That represented an absurd 95% increase since the onset of the worst public health crisis in a century and, more to the point, since the inauguration of a well-meaning policy response which collided with a flight to the suburbs and acute supply constraints to create the second-largest housing bubble in American history. Now here we are.
In the editorial accompanying the updated data, Redfin’s Dana Anderson noted that the median income in April was around $87,600, up 4% YoY. That easily outpaced the sub-1% annual home price growth on Case-Shiller’s indexes for the prior month, but on Redfin’s data, the median home-sale price in April rose 2.4%. As Anderson put it, “affordability is improving only slightly.”
The recent increase in mortgage rates obviously doesn’t help. Wednesday’s MBA update showed the average 30-year fixed was 6.65%, up 30bps over five weeks and the highest since August.
Application activity on the MBA’s measures fell as rates rose, led by a sharp contraction in refis. “Many borrowers [are] understandably back[ing] away,” MBA VP Joel Kan remarked.
Anderson, commenting further, said that although rates in April were 40bps lower YoY, they’ve since climbed alongside Treasury yields. “Because of that, house hunters locking in now may not find the market more affordable than a year ago,” she added.
I’ll leave you with one more disconcerting statistic from Redfin: In 2012, the share of monthly income spent on the mortgage payment for a typical home in America was 21%. Fast forward to 2026 and that share is 40% which, if you can believe it, is actually down meaningfully from the post-pandemic high, a staggering 46% hit in early-2023.
