The record-breaking average age of first-time homebuyers revealed

The rising age of first-time homebuyers has dominated discussion of the housing market in recent months—and multiple sources offer varying estimates of how old the typical first-time buyer really is.

Last year, the National Association of Realtors® reported, based on survey data, that the median age of first-time buyers had jumped to 40. That is the highest age on record, and up from age 33 just five years earlier.

That figure has been widely cited by politicians, and is a simple shorthand for capturing the painful affordability struggles that many first-time homebuyers face in the market.

But not everyone agrees with the NAR figure. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York used estimates based on credit reports that showed the age of first-time buyers trending lower over time to 36.3 in 2024, down from nearly age 38 in 2000.

Recently, a separate estimate based on U.S. Census Bureau data was released by Redfin, asserting that the typical first-time buyer was 35 last year—down from 36 in 2024, but up from 34 a decade earlier.

The varying estimates highlight the difficulty of precisely pinpointing first-time buyer age, with each of the various methods used in the three studies carrying certain benefits and drawbacks.

“Like a lot of questions that seem simple, the question of who is a first-time homebuyer can get murky,” says Realtor.com® Chief Economist Danielle Hale. “Yes, a family who has never purchased a home before is a first-time homebuyer, but what about the family that owned, then rented for a few years before buying again? In some estimates, this family would be considered a first time homebuyer.”

How each analysis was conducted

NAR has surveyed primary residence homebuyers periodically since 1981 by asking them “was this your first home purchase?”

This survey method is the most direct way to gauge the age of first-time buyers, but faces challenges due to its response rate and sample size.

In 2025, NAR mailed out 173,250 questionnaires, which could also be completed online, but had a response rate of just 3.5%. Of the responses, just 1,281 were from self-reported first-time buyers, making for a fairly small sample size.

This led some to question whether the survey results may skew older in general, with younger homebuyers potentially less likely to complete the 120-question survey.

Still, NAR has been conducting its survey consistently for decades, and had an even lower response rate in 2024 (3.2%), when it reported the median age of first-time buyers as 38. If the responses are skewed by age, that skew would have to shift over time to undermine the overall trend.

Meanwhile, the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel report is based on a 5% nationally representative sample of all credit reports going back to 1999. Consumers are recorded as first-time buyers if they show a mortgage on their credit report for the first time.

While this approach avoids the response rate issues of a survey, it has some notable drawbacks. Most significantly, and like other studies based on mortgage data, it omits any buyers who pay cash.

Perhaps surprisingly, NAR says that last year, 8% of first-time buyers used cash to purchase a home. Those cash first-time buyers may well tend to be older than rookie homeowners with a mortgage.

“The U.S. is starting to see transfer of wealth to younger generations, and those younger generations are using that inheritance to make a smart purchase: a home,” NAR deputy chief economist Jessica Lautz wrote in a blog post.

As well, the credit analysis may tend to count divorced or widowed people as first-time buyers, even if they previously purchased a home with their spouse, if their name was not on the prior mortgage.

Finally, the recent analysis released by Redfin infers first-time buyer age from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

That survey does not ask whether someone is a first-time buyer, but does identify homeowners who have moved in the last year, and asks their reasons for doing so. The new analysis considers someone a first-time buyer if they said they moved because they wanted to own a home rather than rent, or to start their own household. 

The strength of this approach is that it is based on population-wide survey data and captures both cash buyers and those with mortgages.

However, this interpretation of the census survey may be mistakenly counting unusual cases as first-time buyers, such as people who inherit homes, or former homeowners who rent for a period and then buy again.

“They are admittedly inferring who is a first-time homebuyer in that data. There’s some noise there,” says Aziz Sunderji, a housing market strategist and founder of Home Economics. “But more importantly, the Census Bureau captures everyone, including all cash buyers, whereas the Fed, because it’s based on credit bureau data, is really only measuring people who use mortgages.”

Sunderji says that overall, he believes the trend seen in Redfin’s analysis of the census data is reliable, “and indeed the median age of first-time homebuyers is increasing” over the last decade.

Other indications that rookie homeowners are getting older

Setting aside the three studies, separate Census Bureau data on homeownership rates seems to confirm that first-time homebuyers are getting older over time.

In fact, the homeownership rate by age 30 has declined for each generation going back to the baby boomers, according to an analysis of census data by Apartment List.

By age 30, 55% of the Silent Generation owned homes, compared with 48% of baby boomers, 42% of Gen X, and just 33% of millennials, the analysis found.

Other census data shows that the homeownership rate for people under age 35 rose steadily from 1994 to 2004, when it peaked at 43.6% ahead of the global financial crisis.

The under-35 homeownership rate plunged through the next decade, reaching a modern low of 34.1% in 2016, at which point virtually every adult under age 35 was a millennial.

Millennials clearly delayed homeownership compared with Gen X, but since 2016 the under-35 homeownership rate has been more volatile than it had previously been.

The rate spiked in 2020 during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then dropped off sharply after interest rates surged in 2022.

More recently, the under-35 homeownership rate surged in the second half of 2025, perhaps reflecting a rise in home purchases that had been otherwise delayed for several years due to affordability constraints.

Because the NAR survey covers the 12 months ending in June of the survey year, it would not capture the late-2025 increase in younger homeownership seen in the census data.