Buyers touring open houses across much of the country are walking through rooms framed before their grandparents were born. Buy a house built in the first half of the 20th century and you inherit original wiring, cast-iron drain pipes, plaster walls, and a furnace decades past its prime. Plenty of households take that deal willingly, since an older house usually sells for less than anything newly built nearby, and the materials and craftsmanship often hold up better than what goes into a subdivision today. Owners pay for the discount later, in repair invoices and utility bills rather than at closing. American housing keeps getting older because the country isn’t replacing it fast enough. A typical U.S. home had been standing 30 years at the turn of the century, and by 2024 the median age reached 43.
Owners of homes finished in 2022 or 2023 spend an average of $164 a year on routine maintenance, while owners of homes built before 1940 spend $1,615, or close to 10 times as much. Condition follows the same line, as 8.7% of pre-1940 homes are classified as inadequate against 0.3% of homes finished since 2022. The underbuilding behind the aging stock traces to the Great Recession, when construction firms shrank or shut down and never fully returned. That long drought in new supply left a national shortfall estimated at 1.5 million to 7.3 million units, and buyers absorbed the shortage in price, paying more than 23% above early 2020 levels for a typical home by the end of 2025. Regional differences are stark, since the median home in New York state has stood 65 years while the median in Nevada has stood 27 and in Arizona and Texas 30.
Construction Coverage set out to find where the aging of American housing has gone furthest, analyzing U.S. Census Bureau figures on when the nation’s homes were built. Researchers used the Census Bureau’s one-year American Community Survey data from 2024 to calculate a median home age across 387 metro areas, then grouped those metros by population so comparable-sized places were measured against each other. Small metros have fewer than 350,000 residents, midsize metros 350,000 to 999,999, and large metros at least 1 million. Ties went to whichever metro had the bigger share of homes standing before 1980. Every large metro in the ranking sits at least 13 years above the national median of 43.