Key insights
- A record number of young adults are living with their parents, driven primarily by soaring housing costs and declining affordability, rather than job scarcity. While employment rates remain stable for this demographic, the trend highlights a significant affordability crisis. Concurrently, separate analysis from the St. Louis Fed indicates a recent dip in the employment-to-population ratio for young adults, suggesting potential headwinds in the job market due to a 'low-hire, low-fire' environment. This confluence of factors points to broader economic pressures impacting consumer behavior and potentially future spending.
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More young adults than ever are living with their parents, and it's not because they don't have jobs.
In 2025, a record 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with their parents, according to Census data analyzed by Realtor.com and published last week. That is 33% of people that age.
The proportion of young people living with their parents was up from 32.4% in 2024 and close to the record high percentage of 33.6% in 2020 during the pandemic. The figure has been on an upward trend for the last quarter century, and is far higher than in 2001, when only 26.7% of adults under 35 still lived at home.1
Of those still living at home, seven out of 10 were employed, leading researchers at Realtor.com to conclude the trend had more to do with rising rents and home prices than with struggles finding a job.
The rising trend of adults living with their parents is one consequence of deteriorating home affordability.
"The relative stability of employment rates within this demographic over the past 25 years, contrasted with the growing share of workers living with parents, highlights that this trend is likely primarily fueled by a housing affordability crisis rather than employment challenges," Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com, wrote in the analysis.
While home affordability may be a greater factor, young adults do face increasing headwinds in the job market. A separate analysis by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, released Monday, showed the employment-to-population ratio for young adults has fallen since 2023 and is down among recent college graduates nationwide. The researchers chalked this up to the scarcity of job openings in today's "low-hire, low-fire" labor market.2
"In a low-hire, low-fire labor market, firms hold on to the workers they have and separations stay low, but hiring slows as employers become more cautious," researchers William M. Rodgers III and Alice L. Kassens wrote in a blog post. "Businesses prioritize efficiency over expansion. The result is fewer new opportunities, less job-to-job switching and greater difficulty for new entrants to gain a foothold in the labor market."
With housing not getting any cheaper, and the job market for young adults potentially getting even tougher as AI squeezes out some entry-level workers, the living-with-parents trend may not have hit its peak yet.