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 of income. By the most recent five-year Census estimates, the same data mapped in the dashboard below, 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
Housing affordability 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 eroding for two decades, but the past five years hit differently. Between 2019 and 2024, median renter housing costs rose 38 percent while renter incomes rose 28 percent. For homeowners, costs and incomes moved in the same direction but barely, with costs up 25 percent against income growth of just 23 percent. Each year, a larger share of the typical paycheck is gone before any other bill gets paid.
Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, which analyzes the annual Census releases and uses a somewhat broader definition than the five-year estimates above, puts the 2024 totals higher still: 43.5 million cost-burdened households, including a record 21.6 million severely burdened. Roughly 6.4 million households were added to the cost-burdened rolls between 2019 and 2024, more households than Maryland has people. 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 years running.
Several forces converged to get here. Housing supply has lagged demand for more than a decade, particularly at the entry level. 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. And the pandemic-era supports that briefly cushioned household budgets, expanded unemployment benefits, provided emergency rental assistance, and boosted the Child Tax Credit have all ended. Wages have not kept pace with the cost of shelter.
Who is hit hardest
Cost burden is not evenly distributed. Among renters, 57 percent of Black renters and 54 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 still shape who gets to build housing wealth and who does not.
Lower-income households carry the most extreme burdens. More than 80 percent of renters earning under $30,000 a year are cost-burdened, and most are severely cost-burdened, meaning more than half their income goes to housing before food, transportation, child care, or medical bills enter the picture. What has shifted since the pandemic is that the cost burden is no longer confined to low-income households. Nearly half of renters earning $45,000 to $74,999 were cost-burdened in 2024, up almost 10 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 65 or older. Even when a home is fully paid off, rising property taxes, insurance, and utilities can push a household into cost-burdened territory. Older renters are squeezed even harder: 58 percent were cost-burdened in 2023, and most of that group was severely burdened. Renter households headed by a person with a disability face similar strain, with 60 percent cost-burdened, 13 percentage points higher than households without one.
Cost burden is becoming a national condition, not a coastal one. It remains highest in California, Hawaii, New York, Florida, and Nevada, with New Jersey close behind, and lowest in West Virginia, the Dakotas, and Iowa. But rural America has seen some of the fastest erosion. Redfin's analysis of home sale prices finds rural prices up 61 percent since before the pandemic, against income growth of just 33 percent. Low rates in lower-cost states do not necessarily mean housing is affordable in absolute terms, since incomes there are often correspondingly lower.
The role of federal housing assistance
The federal government's most direct response is a set of rental assistance programs anchored by Housing Choice Vouchers, public housing, and project-based rental assistance, together serving roughly 5 million households and capping rent contributions at 30 percent of adjusted income. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, created in 1986, has produced nearly 3.9 million units. The scale of need outpaces the resources by a wide margin. Only about one in four households that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receive it. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates a shortage of 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to the lowest-income renters, with just 35 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. 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 ripple well beyond the household budget. Research linking Census data to administrative records has found that compared with a 30 percent rent burden, a 70 percent rent burden is associated with a 12 percent higher all-cause mortality rate. 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 stay housed, resulting in measurable effects on emergency room utilization, hospitalizations, and chronic disease management.
Children in housing-insecure households move more often, change schools more often, and show worse educational and behavioral health outcomes than peers in stable housing. Local economies absorb the costs, too. Every dollar spent above the affordability threshold is a dollar that does not circulate through groceries, child care, small businesses, or savings. When the cost burden tips into eviction, public costs escalate quickly.
The reach of this problem touches every kind of institution. Hospitals absorb it through emergency departments and chronic disease caseloads. Employers bear the costs through absenteeism, turnover, and reduced productivity. Governments absorb it through shelter systems, public health response, and court costs. Funders see it in the gap between what emergency grants can cover and what the underlying need actually requires. Cost burden is not a housing problem that occasionally intersects with other sectors. It is a cross-sector problem that happens to be measured in rent.
What You Can Do
Help your neighbor stay housed. Support local organizations that prevent housing loss, including legal aid groups, emergency rental assistance programs, tenants' rights organizations, and community land trusts. If you know someone struggling to keep up with rent, connecting them 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 because the process is confusing or stigmatizing.
Show up where housing decisions get made. Most of the decisions that determine whether new homes are built and whether tenants are protected are made locally. Attend city council and planning commission meetings, support candidates who prioritize housing supply and tenant stability, and contact elected officials about specific bills. It is more durable than it sounds.
What Organizations Can Do
Hospitals and health systems: Screen patients for housing instability and connect them to legal aid, rental assistance, or medically tailored housing programs. Direct community benefits investments toward supportive housing, medical-legal partnerships, and housing-focused community development financial institutions.
Federal, state, and local governments: Pair LIHTC with state credits and gap financing to produce more units. Pass right-to-counsel ordinances in eviction court. Reform zoning to legalize multifamily housing, accessory dwelling units, and missing-middle housing types. Enact source-of-income protections to prevent landlords from refusing to rent to voucher holders.
Employers: Launch or expand employer-assisted housing programs, emergency assistance funds, and down payment matching. Help employees identify and access housing benefits they already qualify for. Treat housing stability as a workforce investment, not a peripheral benefit.
Grantmakers and funders: Move beyond emergency rental assistance toward investments that build durable infrastructure: tenant organizing capacity, eviction prevention systems, fair housing enforcement, and the data systems that keep housing instability visible over time.