What Do Americans Spend on Housing?

If there’s one thing that brings people together, it’s the ridiculously high cost of housing. Want to buy a place? Good luck with that. If you do luck into homeownership, enjoy those skyrocketing bills. In late April and May, WIRED asked readers how they’re thinking about homes in 2026. More than 200 people responded, sharing how they’re living and at what cost, how their towns have changed, and what compromises they've had to make.

Their top concern, by far? Affordability. The price of everyday goods. Their soaring utility bills. And of course, the biggest cost of all—housing itself. The famous “30 percent” rule, which suggests limiting your housing spend to a third of your income, is effectively moot. According to data released earlier this year, nearly half of all renters paid more than that in 2024, as did 24 percent of homeowners. (A quarter of all rental households spent more than half of their income on housing.)

Financial stress showed up in one answer after another. Here’s how a 35-year-old homeowner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, put it: “I’m finding it hard to dream of fun things. Nothing is affordable.” A 20-year-old who’s living with his parents in De Berry, Texas, has found the stress in his five-person household to be mounting. “There are tons of bills and we can’t afford them all,” he wrote. “There are too many stressors, and personality conflicts are intensifying.”

What people pay varies massively, of course, based on where they live and when they moved in. For people who bought homes in April, the median monthly mortgage was $2,152, while the median asking rent for the first quarter of 2026 was $1,579. The median asking price for a home, meanwhile, was $339,100.

Here are some of the striking archetypes that emerged from our questionnaire.

No surprise: A large number of renters in WIRED’s survey expressed a strong desire to own a home. As Herbert Hoover once famously said, “They never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts.” But several respondents said they felt locked in as “forever renters.” One 31-year-old tenant in Phoenix wrote, “I do not think I will ever be able to own a home or save the money for a down payment. I cry about it often.”

Of course, chasing your own white-picket fence might not be the wisest financial move. In January, LendingTree, a platform that facilitates loans, shared data showing that renting is cheaper than owning in every large urban area in the US. One respondent to WIRED’s survey, a 25-year-old in Boston, seemed to have internalized that home ownership isn’t always a sensible goal. “I do not expect to in the