09/18/2026
A Realtor.com analysis looked at what it would take for the typical mortgage payment to return to roughly 21% of median household income, where it stood in 2019. Today, that share is above 30%.
If mortgage rates stayed around current levels, median household income would need to rise from about $84,763 to $132,171, an increase of roughly 56%. Another path would be for the median home price to fall from about $418,000 to $273,000, a decline of roughly 35%.
A third possibility would be mortgage rates falling dramatically to around 2.65%. More realistically, affordability could improve through some combination of higher wages, lower home prices and lower mortgage rates rather than one of those factors moving by itself.
The numbers show just how much the housing market has changed since before the pandemic. Buyers today are dealing with both much higher home prices and much higher borrowing costs, while wage growth has not kept pace.
Source: Realtor.com Economic Research
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