A Third of Young Adults Are Still Living With Their Parents. It’s the New Normal

A record 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with their parents in 2025, according to new research from Realtor.com®. That’s nearly 1 in 3 young adults and higher than even the pandemic-era count—but the more surprising finding is just how many of them were working.

“Roughly 70% of 25- to 34-year-olds living with parents are employed,” says Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com and author of the report. “That share held steady even as the overall co-residence rate has climbed—meaning the growth is coming from working adults, not people waiting to find jobs.”

The finding challenges one of the most persistent narratives about adults living at home today: that they’re simply languishing in a tepid job market and failing to launch.

Instead, the data points to a more complicated reality. For millions of young adults, a paycheck is no longer the clear dividing line between dependence and independence.

And that poses a harder question for a housing market built around household formation: If having a job isn’t enough to leave home, what is?

Most older young adults living at home are employed

Jones describes the employed-at-home finding as one of the most striking in the data. Among adults ages 25 to 34 who live with their parents, roughly 7 in 10 are employed, according to the report. That includes 71% of 25- to 29-year-olds and 68% of 30- to 34-year-olds.

So what gives?

“Something about their income level, debt load, or the cost of housing in their market is keeping them home despite steady employment,” Jones explains.

The way co-residence has changed over time offers some clues. While living at home has always been more common for the youngest adults, what is more unusual now is how deeply the trend extends into the late 20s and early 30s.

Among adults ages 25 to 29, 20.4% lived with their parents in 2025—nearly six percentage points above the rate at the start of the century, according to the report. Among 30- to 34-year-olds, the share reached 12.7%, nearly double the 7.1% share in 2000 and up from 11.4% in 2019.

The shift points to a deeper affordability problem than any one factor alone could explain, and the housing market provides an apt illustration.

In 2025, the median home price was $430,000, up 34.4% from 2019, while the median asking rent was $1,673, up 17.9%. At the same time, Realtor.com research estimates a roughly 4-million-unit housing supply gap—a shortage that leaves many young adults with fewer realistic ways to form independent households.

Put another way: Work may be steady, but the cost of independence has accelerated.

Debt adds another complication.

Older borrowers carry more debt overall, but much of it is tied to mortgages—debt that can also build wealth, according to New York Fed data. Meanwhile, young adults (18 to 29) carry less total debt, but their balances are more heavily concentrated in student loans, auto loans, and credit cards.

Those monthly obligations can weigh on early career earnings, according to Jones.

“The rise in college attendance over the past 25 years likely plays a role too: More widespread student debt may be constraining what an entry-level salary can actually buy in terms of independent living,” she explains.

The result is a staggering jump in the number of adults living at home compared with just 25 years ago. The report finds that there are 4.86 million more adults under 35 living with their parents than there would have been if early-2000s co-residence patterns had held.

‘No free rides’

But living at home doesn’t always mean an easy path to stacking savings, according to Jim Chamberlin, a real estate agent at Vulcan7.

“There’s a huge misconception that living at home automatically means someone is saving a fortune,” he says. “That can certainly be true in many situations, but in today’s day and age, more and more adult children are beginning to meaningfully contribute to the household.”

Pew Research Center data backs that up: 72% of young adults who live with their parents say they contribute financially to the household in some way. That includes 65% who help pay for groceries, utilities, or other household expenses, and 46% who contribute toward rent or the mortgage.

Chamberlin puts it more bluntly: “They aren’t just getting a free ride under their parents roof.”

But if young adults are still carrying household costs and those costs are still out of pace with their incomes, then avoiding market-rate rent alone may not move them meaningfully closer to independence—and that may be splitting the market in half.

“The reality is probably two groups,” says Jones. “A genuine launchpad cohort with higher incomes and lower debt who will convert to buyers when conditions allow, and a larger group for whom the childhood bedroom is less a runway and more a floor, preventing a worse outcome, but not reliably producing the one they’re aiming for.”

A recent survey from Realtor.com points to that divide. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z respondents have already started saving for a down payment, one-third have taken on a second job or side hustle to do so, and two-thirds see homeownership as an important lifetime goal.

But even for all that motivation and action, only 36% feel financially ready to buy.

Parents under pressure

With so few younger households financially ready to strike out on their own, the next question is whether parents can keep serving as the backstop for delayed adulthood. Jones says the answer is split.

“The sustainability of co-residence as a national coping mechanism depends heavily on the financial health of the generation doing the hosting, and that data would change how you think about the long-run housing market implications,” she explains.

There is already evidence that parents are stretching to make these accommodations work. Chamberlin says he sees it most clearly in what buyers are asking for.

“I’d say the thing I have really seen lately with buyers is them asking whether a home can comfortably support three generations instead of two,” he says. “In the first 75% of my career, that was never something that came up, but I have heard it more and more.”

It’s also changed the downsizing math that was once a common chapter in retirement.

“I have worked with lots of parents who expected to move into something smaller only after the kids left, just to have one or more adult children stay at home much longer than they planned,” Chamberlin adds. “In those cases, they ultimately decided to stay put because the larger home serves a purpose.”

But a larger home can come with higher costs, from taxes and insurance to utilities, repairs, and maintenance. In that sense, working adult children who contribute to the carrying costs of the home can become a financial lifeline for parents, too.

That lifeline may be especially important for longtime homeowners in high-appreciation markets, where selling can come with a punishing tax hit on home equity.

Today, 13.1 million homeowner households, or roughly 15% of owner-occupied households, already have unrealized gains above the capital gains exclusion available to them. And at a time affordability is so strained, that tax bill can be a compelling reason for some longtime owners to not downsize.

“Depending on the family situation, it can actually be a really good way to keep wealth in the family, having multiple members contribute to the mortgage,” Chamberlin says.

In that sense, adults moving back in with their parents is not always a one-way subsidy from parent to child. In some households, it is becoming a way to pool income around one asset instead of sending separate rent checks into the market.