• Some millennials and Gen Zers still live with their parents, particularly in the Northeast and West.
• Economic challenges and cultural factors drive young adults to put off forming their own households.
• Cities in Texas, Florida, and California had the highest shares of young adults living with parents.

Some millennials and Gen Zers are still opting to live with their parents, especially in the Northeast and the West.

A new Pew Research Center analysis looked at where younger Americans, ages 25 to 34, lived in a parent's home in 2023; cities in Texas, Florida, and California had the highest shares of these home-dwellers.

Five of the six metros with the highest shares were in California, with about a third of younger adults living in a parent's home. Meanwhile, the Midwest and the South had the lowest shares of young adults living with parents.

Young people are much more likely to live with their parents when jobs are hard to come by and wages are stagnant, Pew researcher Richard Fry, who authored the report, told BI. Previous Pew research also found that Black, Hispanic, and Asian young adults were more likely than their white counterparts to live with their parents.

"This may be reflecting economic differences in terms of being able to afford to live independently, and it also may be reflecting some cultural differences," Fry said.

There's also a gender gap: 20% of young adult men lived with a parent, while just 15% of women fell into that category.

The share of younger Americans living with their parents has dropped in recent years, coming down to 18% in 2023, but it's still well above historic lows in the 1970s. The 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession supercharged the trend, with many young adults living in their parents' homes for years after.

Many recent college graduates and millennials found themselves back in their parents' homes when the pandemic hit, closing schools and forcing widespread remote work. As of 2022, some Gen Zers considered it a more permanent arrangement, especially as housing costs and inflation raised the barriers to living independently.

A 2023 Pew survey found that nearly two-thirds of young adults who were living with their parents said it was good for their wallets. "Even if you got a job, even if earnings are coming in, as a young adult, you may indeed want to live with your parents because it improves your finances," Fry said.

Perhaps surprisingly, local housing markets didn't seem to have much influence on younger people living at home. The Pew analysis found that housing costs weren't strongly correlated with the rates of younger Americans living at a parent's home.

As BI previously reported, the reliance of Gen Z and millennials on their parents has led to new conversations on when — or if — to cut off support. After all, Gen Zers are facing their own set of economic hurdles, which may only be accentuated in another downturn.

It's not clear how the trend will change in the coming years — much depends on how well the US economy fares. And whether young adults rent or buy their own homes will have implications for the US economy, broadly, as well as their personal finances.

"Household formation is important for the national economy, so in terms of an economic driver, this is a bad thing," Fry said. But, if living with parents helps young adults "manage their finances and maintain their credit scores and be able to pay their student loan payments, that's probably a good thing."

Are you an adult living with a parent or a parent with adult kids living at home? Reach out to these reporters to share at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

• Easier access to mortgages starting in the 1930s spurred the US baby boom, researchers found.
• Two federal programs increased homeownership for eligible Americans, boosting marriage and birth rates.
• Low homeownership rates today may partially explain declining birth rates around the world.

If you want Americans to have more babies, it helps if it's cheap and easy to buy a house.

The advent of mortgages with low down payments in the 1930s facilitated a sharp uptick in the US birth rate that created the baby boom, per a National Bureau of Economic Research February 2025 working paper. The findings might help explain why countries across the globe, including the US, are struggling with tumbling birth rates as housing prices soar and homeownership for younger people stagnates.

The researchers — economists Lisa Dettling at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Melissa Schettini Kearney at the University of Maryland — found that two mortgage insurance programs led to 3 million additional births between 1935 and 1957, accounting for about 10% of the spike in births associated with the baby boom. The researchers found that these new mortgages lowered the age when people got married and had their first child and increased the total number of kids they had.

In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration introduced a loan insurance program that offered potential homebuyers 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with much lower down payments than had previously been required. A decade later, the Veteran's Administration began insuring home loans for returning servicemembers with no down payment required.

The FHA and VA-backed loans were a huge hit. The programs helped boost the rate of homeownership among white people of childbearing age from 20% to 50% between 1940 and 1960. And half of this homeownership spike happened before the end of World War II — even as many Americans were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and few new homes were being constructed.

The researchers analyzed newly hand-digitized data on FHA and VA loans, birth count data from the National Center for Health Statistics, population data from the Census, and personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to come to their findings.

The analysis finds that these mortgages did not have a discernible effect on births among non-white women because these women were less likely to have access to or benefit from FHA and VA mortgages. Historically, Black Americans were "redlined" out of these mortgages while the bulk of the FHA and VA loans went to white families — the government wouldn't insure homes in areas that they deemed too risky or undesirable, which were often predominantly Black or minority neighborhoods.

How cheaper mortgages led to a baby boom

Finances are key when it comes to the decision to have a kid. When unemployment rises or incomes fall, people have fewer babies. Millennials have been particularly hard-hit by sky-rocketing healthcare and housing costs, and the debt crisis. Their generation controls less than 5% of the nation's wealth, while baby boomers held 21% of the country's wealth at the same age range.

This has all led to a gap between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually have. Some European countries have tried to lift birth rates to subsidize childcare and paid family leave, but have seen mixed results.

"If expenses — especially housing costs — were more reasonable, I'd feel much more financially secure and rich," Madelyn Driver, a millennial earning six figures who was still struggling to afford a home, previously told BI.

Dettling and Kearney's research found that it's actually more about easier access to homeownership rather than lower housing costs.

The type of mortgage that took off in the 1940s didn't bring overall housing costs down; it just reduced the barrier to becoming a homeowner by allowing very low down payments and long-term loans. This meant people could purchase homes at younger ages, often before they made the decision to have kids.

Making it easier for younger people to buy homes now could help boost plummeting birth rates — although, as 2008's housing crisis showed, it's still important to ensure that borrowers are fit to be eligible for mortgages.

One of the key lessons of the mortgage baby boom findings, per Kearney, is that policy that opens the door to accessible credit or lower down payments can make a real impact. "It's not just about, 'Oh, we need housing to be less expensive,'" she said.

Homeownership rates for younger Americans fell after the mid-aughts housing bubble popped and, while they've ticked up over the last decade, still remain relatively low. For Americans under 35 years of age, there's been an even more recent decline in homeownership since late 2020.

"Maybe how easy it is to have kids is less about can they take three months off work versus 'do I have a bedroom to put this kid in for the next 18 years?'" Kearney said.

Do you have a story to share about homeownership and having children? Contact these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected].