“There are two clocks ticking,” Amanda Pendleton, Zillow’s Home Trends Expert, told Moneywise. “The first clock is how long it takes to save for a down payment, driven by home prices relative to local incomes. The second is how long you need to own before buying beats renting financially.”
According to Zillow’s analysis, an average U.S. household requires eight-and-a-half years to save for a 20% down payment on a “typical single-family home,” with a little over six years “before owning comes out ahead financially compared to renting a single-family home.”
“Where rents are cheap, like Austin, buying has more ground to make up,” Pendleton said. “Where rents are expensive, like Miami, owning starts looking good faster.”
She added that areas with high home prices leave buyers “with a larger financial deficit, requiring more time to recover.” And as Zillow found, the highest-priced markets could leave buyers waiting nearly 50 years to break even.
Where you live could make or break the math
According to the Zillow report, San Jose boasts the longest national break-even wait time for homeowners, at 49.2 years, with San Francisco (46.9 years), San Diego (40.4 years) and Los Angeles (37.7 years) close behind. Pittsburgh (11.1 years), Detroit (11.4 years), Indianapolis (11.5 years) and Cincinnati (12.2 years) have the shortest times.
Pendleton pointed to the housing shortage as a culprit, saying the U.S. “is short 4.7 million homes and the places with the biggest deficits tend to have the longest break-even timelines.”
The median price for a single-family existing home rose 1.5% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026 to $434,900, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). And the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate recently hit 6.89% — its highest since last June.
Rent for zero to two bedroom properties in the 50 largest U.S. metros, meanwhile, dropped for the 36th consecutive month in July, with Realtor.com adding that starter home renters in those cities save $858 a month more than those who buy homes there.
That said, while more renters are eschewing homeownership to invest that saved money elsewhere, some experts feel the stats don’t tell the whole story.
Benjamin Clark, president of the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents (NAEBA), told Moneywise that “the biggest factor influencing that 15-year [Zillow] number is the assumption that a buyer must save a 20% down payment.” Instead, he said buyers could opt for a 10% or less down payment to get in and let the equity build over time.
