The annual cost of owning a median-priced U.S. home reached 47% of median household income in July 2025, according to an explanation by Tufts economist Jeffrey Zabel published in Tufts Now. The figure highlights an affordability problem that extends beyond a home’s advertised price. Zabel describes the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, which measures whether a median-income household can cover the annual costs of a median-priced home. Those costs include mortgage principal and interest at current rates, property taxes, property insurance and private mortgage insurance. Under that measure, homeownership is considered unaffordable when annual costs exceed 30% of annual median household income. The July 2025 figure exceeded earlier peaks before the 2008 financial crisis, Zabel reports. Several expenses contributed to the squeeze. House prices rose rapidly during the pandemic, followed by a steep increase in borrowing costs in 2022. The Tufts article reports that average 30-year fixed mortgage rates had remained above 6% since September 2022. Higher construction-material prices and increasing damage from climate disasters also contributed to rising homeowner insurance premiums. The geography is more complicated than a simple division between expensive coastal cities and affordable alternatives. Zabel discusses a separate American Enterprise Institute measure covering first-time buyers in the 60 largest metropolitan areas. Based on median house prices relative to median household income over 2013–2023, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Oklahoma City were the three most affordable metros. Yet San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles recorded the strongest improvements in that measure over the period because their inflation-adjusted house-price growth was below average. Improvement did not mean they had become the cheapest places to buy. Conversely, affordability deteriorated particularly sharply in places including Boise City, Dallas, Cape Coral, Deltona and Grand Rapids. These findings establish pressure on prospective homeowners, but they do not measure rents or isolate the experiences of nurses, teachers, care workers or other essential employees. A national median cannot show whether a particular worker can afford a home near a particular job. The evidence therefore supports a clear but bounded conclusion: homeownership costs were consuming a substantial share of typical household income, and affordability pressures had spread beyond traditionally expensive markets. Whether cities are pricing out the workers they need requires additional local evidence linking housing costs with occupations and wages.