- Home ownership among young adults has recovered to 2010 levels
- In 2022/2023, 39% of 25 to 34 year olds owned their own home, compared to 33% in 2015
- 69% of 45 to 59 year olds own a home in 2022/23, up from 80% in the early 2000s
Home ownership among young adults has risen to levels not seen since 2010, according to a new study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
The report shows that in 2022/2023, 39 percent of 25 to 34-year-olds owned their own home, which is 6 percentage points more than the 33 percent in 2015.
The IFS says there has been a partial recovery in home ownership among 25 to 34 year olds over the past decade.
Since 2015, there has been a partial recovery in home ownership among 25-34 year olds, an increase of 6 percentage points to 39% in 2022-2023
However, homeownership among young people remains about 20 percentage points lower than the peak in 2000, when 59 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their own home.
According to the study, the recovery is concentrated among middle-income people and may be related to the fact that the disposable income of young adults has grown significantly faster than the population as a whole since 2015.
Jonathan Cribb, associate director at IFS, said: ‘The collapse of home ownership among young adults has been at the center of policy concerns for some time: not surprising given that for every 100 young people, there were 20 fewer homeowners in 2022 than in 2000.
‘But if anything, recent trends are positive – with a gradual recovery for 25-34 year olds since 2015, possibly linked to better income growth over that period.
‘In fact, we now see that the entire decline in home ownership among young people actually occurred before 2010.
“While it is middle-income young adults whose homeownership has rebounded the most since 2015, they are still the group that has experienced the largest decline since the early 2000s.
“This modest recovery occurred both before and after the pandemic. Whether rising mortgage rates will stop or even reverse this trend remains to be seen.’
Despite the recent positive trend among young people, the opposite appears to be true for the 45 to 59 age group, despite the fact that 69 percent are homeowners.
For these older, working-age adults, the gradual decline in home ownership has continued as generations of people have found it harder to get on the housing ladder and reach these ages.
According to the IFS, home ownership for this age group has fallen by 7 percentage points since 2010 and is 11 percentage points below the peak of the early 2000s.