“Fewer Americans own homes than thought, new Fed search finds”

What actually happened

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis introduced a new metric, the homeowners-to-population ratio (HPOP), which counts individual adult homeowners rather than owner-occupied housing units. The homeownership rate in the United States is reported to be 65 percent, but this commonly cited data point is actually the owner-occupancy rate, which tells us how many housing units are occupied by an owner. By the new count, only 22% of adults under 35 own their homes compared to the 37% figure under the old measure, and the national gap runs from 65% down to 53%.

Key facts

• National HPOP: 53% of U.S. adults own homes, versus the traditional 65% owner-occupancy rate.
• Researchers estimate that nearly 14% of U.S. adults live in owner-occupied homes but are not owners themselves, a group that includes adult children living with their parents.
• "More than one in eight of the nation's adults are misrepresented in the most-cited statistic on homeownership," the researchers wrote.
• California: HPOP 41.2% vs. 55.9% owner-occupancy. New York: 43.3% vs. 54.3%.
• Under-35 gap: 37% (owner-occupancy) vs. 22% (HPOP) for 2024.
• Report authored by Erik Hembre, Maxine Xu and Ben Horowitz, released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, July 15, 2026.

What to watch for

Watch whether follow-on coverage starts using HPOP interchangeably with the Census owner-occupancy rate without the caveat, since the two answer different questions (units vs. people) and the authors themselves say owner-occupancy remains valid for tax-policy and housing-stock questions. Also watch state-level breakdowns, as high-cost states like California and Hawaii show the widest HPOP-to-owner-occupancy gaps, a pattern likely to get amplified in local coverage.