Millennials are about 30-40% less likely to own a home than earlier generations were at the same age

Summary

At the same age, today's young adults own homes at a substantially lower rate than earlier generations did. By age 30, only 33% of Millennials owned a home, versus 48% of Baby Boomers and 55% of the Silent Generation at that same age — meaning Millennials were roughly 31% less likely than Boomers, and 40% less likely than the Silent Generation, to own a home at 30 (15 and 22 percentage points respectively). The gap is smaller against the generation immediately before them: Gen X was 42% at 30, so Millennials were about 21% less likely than Gen X. The gap narrows, but does not close, as Millennials age into their late 30s: other research (Redfin, using Federal Reserve/Census data) puts the 2024 age-35 rate at 56% for Millennials versus 61.5% for Boomers at 35, roughly 9% less likely.

The headline, age-controlled figures

These come from Apartment List's 2025 Millennial Homeownership Report, which uses Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata to compute an individual-level homeownership rate — the share of adults who are the householder, or the householder's spouse, in an owner-occupied home — for each generation at the identical age (30), controlling for age itself. This is the standard way researchers make a generation-vs-generation comparison apples-to-apples, since simply comparing current rates (e.g., 2024's 74% for Boomers vs. 47% for Millennials) mixes the age effect (older people own more) with the generational effect and overstates the true gap.

The report also finds this is not a one-time Millennial problem: each of the last three generations bought homes more slowly than the one before it (Silent > Boomer > Gen X > Millennial, all measured at 30), and an early look at Gen Z (9% owning homes as of 2024, the oldest cohort only 27) suggests the trend is worsening further, not reversing.

The gap narrows somewhat with age, but doesn't disappear

Separate reporting (Redfin, drawing on Federal Reserve and Census data) finds that by age 35 in 2024, 56% of Millennials owned homes versus 59.4% of Gen X and 61.5% of Boomers at the same age — a gap of about 5.5 points, or roughly 9% relatively, versus Boomers. That is a smaller relative gap than the 31% gap at age 30, meaning Millennials have been catching up somewhat as they've aged into their prime home-buying years (helped by wage growth and, for older Millennials, entering the market before the post-2021 rate/price spike). But Apartment List's state-level breakdown shows Millennials in their late 30s (35-39) still trail Gen X's rate at the same age in 48 of 50 states plus DC, in some cases (New Hampshire, Connecticut) by more than 10 points — so the gap has narrowed, not closed.

Corroborating trend from the AskAmerica corpus (ACS)

Census ACS 5-year data (table B25007, census.acs_housing_tenure_by_age) lets the corpus compute a national, household-level ownership rate for householders aged 25-34 directly: it fell from 45.3% in 2009 to a low of 37.6% in 2016, and has only partially recovered to 40.8% by 2023 — still below its 2009 level 14 years later. This corroborates the direction and persistence of the decline, but ACS only goes back to 2009 (already inside the Millennial cohort's young-adult years), so it cannot itself reach back to when Boomers were in their 20s and 30s (the 1970s-1990s) — that comparison necessarily rests on the CPS-based, generation-labeled figures above, which is why this report leads with the Apartment List/Census CPS numbers rather than a warehouse-only computation.

Query used: SELECT "year", SUM(owner_25_to_34)::double / (SUM(owner_25_to_34)+SUM(renter_25_to_34)) AS rate FROM census.acs_housing_tenure_by_age WHERE geography='state' AND county IS NULL GROUP BY "year"

Every query behind this report

1 warehouse call ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT "year",
  SUM(owner_25_to_34) AS owners_25_34,
  SUM(owner_25_to_34) + SUM(renter_25_to_34) AS total_25_34,
  CAST(SUM(owner_25_to_34) AS DOUBLE) / (SUM(owner_25_to_34)+SUM(renter_25_to_34)) AS rate_25_34,
  CAST(SUM(owner_35_to_44) AS DOUBLE) / (SUM(owner_35_to_44)+SUM(renter_35_to_44)) AS rate_35_44,
  CAST(SUM(owner_45_to_54) AS DOUBLE) / (SUM(owner_45_to_54)+SUM(renter_45_to_54)) AS rate_45_54
FROM census.acs_housing_tenure_by_age
WHERE geography = 'state' AND county IS NULL
GROUP BY "year"
ORDER BY "year"