One Paycheck from the Edge: Housing Cost Burden in the US
For millions of American households, housing now costs more than they can reasonably afford. Federal policy defines two thresholds: cost burdened means housing and utilities exceed 30 percent of income, and severely cost burdened means they exceed half. By the most recent Census data, roughly 38.5 million households have crossed the first line and 18.4 million have crossed the second.
Behind those numbers are decisions that get harder every month: rent or a prescription, staying put or moving farther from work, building equity or watching it slip away. Housing affordability has become the defining household economic story of the past five years.
Explore the data about housing cost burden in America
Cost burden affects every part of the United States, though not equally. The dashboard below maps household-level data so you can see what affordability looks like where you live, where you work, or where you are simply curious about. Start by searching for a county to get a closer look. You can also switch between the 30 percent threshold (cost burdened) and the 50 percent threshold (severely cost burdened) to see how the picture changes at each level. This data is sourced from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey, the most comprehensive ongoing measure of household economic conditions in the country.
In the interactive dashboard below, the darker the shade of a county or state, the larger the share of households whose housing costs exceed the chosen threshold. Please note that the interactive dashboard works best on a desktop.
A long-running crisis that accelerated fast
Housing affordability has been getting worse for two decades, but the past five years marked a sharp inflection. Between 2019 and 2024, median renter housing costs rose 38 percent while renter incomes rose 28 percent. For homeowners, median costs rose 25 percent against income growth of 23 percent. Each year, a larger share of the typical paycheck is consumed before any other bill is paid.
Roughly 6.4 million households were added to the cost-burdened rolls between 2019 and 2024, a population larger than Maryland. The number of severely cost-burdened households reached a record 21.6 million in 2024. Among renters, 22.7 million households are now cost burdened, equal to 49 percent of all renters, and that share has set a new high for four straight years.
Several factors converged. Housing supply has lagged demand for more than a decade, particularly in the entry-level price tiers. Mortgage rates roughly doubled between late 2021 and 2023, locking existing owners in place and pulling inventory off the market. Insurance and property taxes have climbed sharply in many states. Pandemic-era supports that briefly cushioned household budgets, including expanded unemployment, emergency rental assistance, and the boosted Child Tax Credit, have all ended. Wages have not kept up with the cost of shelter.
Who Is Hit Hardest
Cost burden is not evenly distributed. Among renter households, 56 percent of Black renters and 53 percent of Hispanic renters are cost burdened, compared with 45 percent of white renters. Among homeowners, the gap persists: 32 percent of Black homeowners and 29 percent of Hispanic homeowners are cost burdened, against 22 percent of white homeowners. These gaps reflect decades of discriminatory lending, exclusionary zoning, and wage inequality that compounded across generations and that still shape who can build housing wealth and who cannot.
Lower-income households shoulder the most extreme burdens. More than 80 percent of renters earning under $30,000 a year are cost burdened, and most of them are severely cost burdened, meaning more than half of their income goes to housing before food, transportation, child care, or medical bills enter the picture. What has changed since the pandemic is that cost burden is no longer confined to low-income households. Nearly half (49 percent) of renters earning $45,000 to $74,999, squarely middle income, were cost burdened in 2024, up 9.5 percentage points from 2019. Even among renters earning $75,000 or more, the cost-burdened share has reached 14 percent.
Older adults are another fast-growing group. Roughly half of newly cost-burdened homeowner households since 2019 are headed by someone age 65 or older. Even when a home is fully paid off, rising property taxes, insurance, and utilities can push a household onto the cost-burdened list. Households headed by an elderly person or person with a disability account for nearly 40 percent of severely cost-burdened renters despite making up only 29 percent of all renters.
Geography matters too. Cost burden is highest in California (38.9 percent), Hawaii (36.8 percent), New York (35.7 percent), Florida (35.1 percent), Nevada (34.5 percent), and New Jersey (34.3 percent). It is lowest in West Virginia (20.0 percent), South Dakota (22.1 percent), North Dakota (22.3 percent), and Iowa (22.4 percent). Low rates in lower-cost states do not necessarily mean housing is affordable in absolute terms; incomes in those places are often correspondingly lower.
The county picture is more concentrated than the state map suggests. The top 100 counties hold roughly half of all cost-burdened households in the country. Bronx County, New York is the only county where a majority of households (50.9 percent) are cost burdened, and 30 percent of all households there are severely cost burdened. Miami-Dade (45.9 percent), Los Angeles (43.9 percent), Broward (43.8 percent), and Kings County, New York (43.2 percent) are not far behind. Rural America has seen the fastest erosion of affordability over the past five years, with rural home prices up 61 percent since the pandemic against income growth of just 33 percent. Cost burden is becoming a national condition, not a coastal one.
The Role of Federal Housing Assistance
The federal government's most direct response to cost burden is a set of rental assistance programs anchored by Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8), public housing, and project-based rental assistance. Together these programs serve roughly 5 million households and cap a recipient's rent contribution at 30 percent of adjusted income, the same threshold that defines cost burden. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the largest federal program supporting affordable rental housing, has produced more than 3.7 million units since 1986.
The scale of the need outpaces the resources. Only about one in four households who qualify for federal rental assistance actually receive it; the rest sit on waiting lists that, in many cities, are years long or closed entirely. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates a shortage of more than 7 million rental homes affordable and available to the lowest-income renters. Just 37 affordable units exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. Federal housing assistance budgets have been roughly flat in real terms for years even as need has grown, and current proposals would tighten eligibility, raise tenant rent contributions, or impose new work requirements. Insufficient supply, insufficient subsidy, and rising costs together form the central tension shaping the next decade of housing policy.
Why This Matters Beyond the Households Experiencing It
High housing costs reach well past the household budget. Research linking ACS data to administrative records has found that, compared with a rent burden of 30 percent, a rent burden of 70 percent is associated with 12 percent higher all-cause mortality. An eviction filing alone is associated with a 19 percent increase in mortality, and an eviction judgment with a 40 percent increase. Severely cost-burdened households cut spending on food, health care, and prescriptions to keep a roof overhead, producing measurable downstream effects on emergency room utilization, hospitalization, and chronic disease management.
Children in housing-insecure households move more often, change schools more often, and post lower test scores and worse behavioral health outcomes than their peers in stable housing. Local economies absorb the costs too. Every dollar a household spends above the affordability threshold is a dollar that does not circulate through groceries, child care, small business, or savings. When cost burden tips into eviction, the public costs escalate sharply, with shelters, public health response, courts, and lost wages all compounding.
What You Can Do
Help your neighbor stay housed. The most direct action is supporting local organizations that prevent housing loss, including legal aid groups, emergency rental assistance funds, tenants' rights organizations, and community land trusts. If you know someone struggling to keep up with rent, helping them connect to a 211 navigator, a legal aid clinic, or a housing counseling agency can be the difference between staying housed and entering the eviction system. Many eligible households never apply for assistance because the process is confusing or stigmatized, not because they don't need it.
Show up where housing decisions get made. Housing policy is set at every level of government: federal funding for vouchers and LIHTC, state-level tenant protections and zoning preemption, and local zoning, permitting, and inclusionary housing rules. Most of the levers that determine whether new homes get built and whether tenants are protected from eviction are local. Showing up at city council and planning commission meetings, supporting candidates who prioritize housing supply and tenant stability, and contacting elected officials about specific bills are among the most durable things an individual can do.
What Organizations Can Do
Hospitals and health systems are positioned to lead. They see the consequences of housing instability every day in their emergency departments and chronic disease caseloads. Screening patients for housing instability and connecting them to legal aid, rental assistance, or medically tailored housing programs is a high-impact, low-cost intervention. Community benefit investments in supportive housing, medical-legal partnerships, and housing-focused community development financial institutions are a natural fit for nonprofit hospital resources.
States and local governments hold most of the levers. State housing finance agencies can pair LIHTC with state credits and gap financing to produce more units. Right-to-counsel ordinances in eviction court have substantially reduced eviction rates wherever they have been implemented. Zoning reforms that legalize multifamily housing, accessory dwelling units, and missing-middle housing types directly address supply constraints. Source-of-income protections prevent landlords from refusing voucher holders.
Employers see the costs whether or not they recognize them. Housing instability shows up at work as absenteeism, reduced productivity, and turnover. Employer-assisted housing programs, emergency assistance funds, down payment matching, and helping employees access housing benefits they already qualify for are among the highest-return investments a company can make in workforce stability. For grantmakers and funders, the most durable investments go beyond emergency rental assistance to include tenant organizing capacity, eviction prevention infrastructure, fair housing enforcement, and the data systems that keep housing instability visible.