The empty nest is filling back up. About 25.2 million adults under 35 are still living with mom and dad in 2025, and most of them have jobs.
Roughly 70% of 25- to 34-year-olds who live at home are working, per a new Realtor.com report. Many also hold college degrees, which means the thing they are missing is not work but a home they can afford.
The U.S. is short about 4 million homes, and the gap is widest for starter houses. Home building has lagged demand since the 2008 crash.
The result is a wave of young adults who have done the right things on paper. They just cannot find a starter home they can afford.
"This is a supply problem, not an employment story," said Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com. In 2000, only about one in nine working late-20s adults lived at home, but by 2025 that share had climbed closer to one in seven.
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The national median home asking price is now $430,000, up 34.4% from 2019. The median rent has climbed to $1,673, up about 18% over the same stretch.
The typical first-time buyer is now 40. That is not a slip but the math of a market where prices have outrun pay for a decade.
"Twenty-five million adults living with their parents represents a generation of latent demand the market hasn't absorbed," Jones said. Every adult still in a childhood bedroom is a household that has not formed.
That is a lease unsigned and a starter home unsold.
Living at home longer can carry a long tail of costs. Each year spent at home is a year an adult does not build home equity.
The longer the delay, the harder it gets to catch up.
NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun expects the median U.S. home price to hit $1 million by 2050. That is right when most millennials reach retirement age.
"Back in 1990, the national median price was $90,000," Yun said at a Washington, D.C., event this week. The math today rhymes with the math then, just with bigger numbers.
The story is not all gloom. Builders are watching this group closely, and a wave of starter homes could shift the math fast.
State and local rules drive up the cost of a new home by about $132,000 on average, per builders. If those rules ease, that helps young buyers more than anyone else.
The latent demand has to land somewhere. If builders finally put up starter homes - or if homes get more affordable - millions of young adults could enter the market at once.
That is the bull case for home builders, landlords, and anyone holding starter-home stock. It is also why their parents are watching home values closely.
For now, 25 million couches are still occupied.
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