The report's central findings
Household growth slowed for a third consecutive year in 2025, falling from an average of 2.0 million new households per year in 2021 to 1.1 million in 2025, according to The State of the Nation's Housing 2026, published by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies on June 17.
The residential mobility rate reached a record low of 11.2% in 2024. Cost burdens for both owners and renters reached what the report described as another record high. Analysis of the report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition put the number of cost-burdened renter households at 22.7 million, or 49% of all renters, in 2024.
The supply picture compounded the problem: 11 million extremely low-income households competed for 3.8 million affordable and available rental units in 2024. Construction starts slipped 1% over the year, driven by a 7% decline in single-family starts, and existing home sales sat at three-decade lows.
Why halved household formation matters
Analysis: the drop from 2.0 million to 1.1 million new households a year is the report's most structurally significant number, and it is easily misread as good news for housing demand.
Household growth has several independent drivers, and cost is only one of them. The size of the cohort reaching the typical age of household formation, the pace of immigration, marriage and partnership patterns, and mortality among older single-person households all move the total, and demographic composition alone can shift annual formation by hundreds of thousands of households without any change in prices. The report presents slowing formation alongside record cost burdens; it does not isolate how much of the slowdown each factor explains, and neither does this article.
What can be said is that suppressed formation, from whatever mix of causes, is not the same thing as satisfied demand. Adults who remain in a parent's home or a shared arrangement are counted as part of an existing household rather than as unmet need, so a falling formation rate can mask demand rather than retire it. The record-low 11.2% mobility rate describes a related condition: people are not moving, which reduces both listings and transactions, and is consistent with existing-home sales at multi-decade lows.
Insurance as an emerging cost driver
Property insurance has become a distinct component of housing cost pressure, and it is now receiving dedicated regulatory attention.
The NAIC's Center for Insurance Policy and Research published a final research report on July 31 examining countrywide state-level homeowners insurance market dynamics from 2018 to 2024, authored by Jeffrey Czajkowski and Paula Harms, with the standard disclaimer that it reflects the authors' opinions rather than official NAIC positions. A related 2026 homeowners market data call, with FAQ updated March 16, covers insurers writing at least $50,000 in homeowners or dwelling fire coverage for report years 2018 through 2025.
The Urban Institute separately published Property Insurance Affordability: How Rising Costs Burden Mortgage Borrowers in May 2026, using regression modeling of borrower-level mortgage data, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both efforts share a premise worth noting: insurance cost data have historically been fragmented across state regulators, which is why a countrywide market data call and a borrower-level modeling study were needed at all to describe a cost that appears in nearly every mortgage payment.
Reading an annual report against monthly data
The State of the Nation's Housing describes conditions through 2024 and 2025, while the monthly and quarterly releases published since cover 2026. The two describe different periods and should not be blended.
On several measures the 2026 data are consistent with the report's trajectory. JCHS recorded construction starts down 1% with single-family starts down 7%; Census and HUD subsequently reported August 2026 starts down 1.2% year over year with completions down 27.1%. JCHS described existing home sales at three-decade lows; NAR reported an annualized pace of 3.98 million for August 2026.
On one measure the 2026 data differ. JCHS documented rising rent burdens through 2024, while national rent trackers showed rents down 0.8% year over year in August 2026 as the apartment supply wave was absorbed. Cost burdens accumulated over years do not reverse in the months during which rents flatten.
That distinction is the report's underlying argument. Affordability is a stock problem built up over a decade, and a period of flat rents or real price declines reduces it only slowly.