The April release
S&P Dow Jones Indices published the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller indices covering April 2026 data on June 30, 2026. The National Composite rose 0.8 percent year over year on an unadjusted basis, up from 0.7 percent in March. The 10-City Composite was 1.77 percent higher and the 20-City Composite 1.14 percent higher.
Within the 20-city panel, Chicago led at 6.5 percent annual growth while Seattle was the weakest at negative 2.3 percent — a spread of roughly nine percentage points between two large metros in the same month.
National month-over-month appreciation was 0.8 percent, below the 1.0 percent average for April in the 2015 to 2019 period.
Why the dispersion is the story
A national index of 0.8 percent is a weighted average of markets moving in opposite directions, not a description of typical conditions. Markets that added the least new supply relative to household growth through the 2020s generally held price growth; markets that built heavily, or that depend on a single sector’s employment, did not.
The nominal figures also understate what happened to housing wealth in real terms. S&P noted that inflation-adjusted home values fell for an eleventh consecutive month, with April consumer price inflation of 3.8 percent outpacing the 0.8 percent nominal gain by roughly three points.
How the index is built
Case-Shiller is a repeat-sales index: it pairs successive arm’s-length sales of the same single-family home and measures the change between them. It excludes new construction entirely, because a newly built home has no prior sale to pair with, and it excludes condominiums from the main indices.
The index is published with a two-month lag and on a three-month moving average basis, so the April figure incorporates transactions from February through April. It is among the most methodologically careful US house-price measures available and also among the slowest to reflect a turn.
Two housekeeping notes accompany this release. The Detroit metro index was suppressed for April because of transaction-recording delays at the Wayne County recording office, leaving March as its last valid update, and the index is now co-badged S&P Cotality Case-Shiller following the rebranding of data co-sponsor CoreLogic as Cotality.
Reading it alongside FHFA
FHFA published its own April house price index on the same day, June 30, showing prices down 0.1 percent for the month and up 2.0 percent over the year. The two figures are not in conflict: FHFA measures purchase transactions financed by conforming loans bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while Case-Shiller covers a broader universe including jumbo-financed and cash purchases.
That difference in coverage is why Case-Shiller’s national annual figure runs more than a point below FHFA’s for the same month. Higher-priced segments outside the conforming universe performed worse in the period, which pulls the broader index down relative to the narrower one.
Analysis: for readers tracking a specific market, the metro-level series is the usable product and the national composite is close to noise. A buyer in Seattle and a buyer in Chicago faced conditions in April 2026 that no single national number can represent.