A Third of U.S. Burdened by Housing Cost

U.S. Census data analyzed by Harvard University shows that a third of all U.S. households, whether they are buying or renting, spend more than the recommended one third of their income on housing and utilities and therefore qualify as cost-burdened.

While the overall rate of households burdened by housing cost in the U.S. was 32.7 percent in 2023, several states had even higher average burdens. California, known for its high cost of living, came in at 41.7 percent of burdened households, followed by Hawaii at 39.5 percent, Florida at 38.6 percent and New York at 38.2 percent. In general, West Coast states and those in the country's populous Northeast showed the highest burdens, with the addition of sunshine locations Florida and Hawaii. The least burdened households were found in the interior of the country, in West Virginia, North Dakota and Iowa, where fewer than a quarter of households felt an outsized financial burden because of housing costs. Colorado and Texas came in 11th and 12th.

The report published this week shows that renters are more often overburdened by their costs that homeowners, but that the gap has been closing in recent years. Before and after the Great Recession, homeowners were still more overburdened than renters in the country, but this equilibrium changed in 2012 when renters began to be burdened more by rising rent costs while homeowners were profiting from zero interest rates. With the end of the no-interest era in 2022, homeowners' burden jumped up, while the economic hardships of the inflation crisis affected both types of households. The researchers also identified higher insurance premiums and property taxes as an issue for homeowners, while saying that more than half of renters were spending more than 50 percent of household income on renting in 50 out of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States.