About the Data
Three federal series, one continuous record.
The master data table is the Almanac's primary reference — a single row per year, 1963 to 2024, with every annual figure that drives every chart, year-archive, and Q&A page on this site. The six columns capture the three federal data series that define the U.S. housing market's quantitative history: new-home sales from the Census Bureau, existing-home sales from NAR, median sale prices for both, and the 30-year fixed mortgage rate from Freddie Mac PMMS.
The table encodes 62 years of the American housing market in roughly 370 data cells. Some patterns jump immediately from the raw figures. New-home sales have ranged from a low of 306K (2011) to a high of 1,283K (2005) — a 4:1 ratio within a single dataset. Existing-home sales have ranged from 1.55M (1968–1969, the first years of NAR tracking) to 7.08M (2005). Mortgage rates span from 2.96% (2021) to 16.63% (1981). Median existing-home prices span from $20,100 (1968) to $408,000 (2024) — a 20× nominal increase over 56 years that translates to roughly 2× in real inflation-adjusted terms.
Each year in the leftmost column links to a full year-archive page with narrative context, YoY comparisons, and historical positioning. The year-archive pages are the editorial layer that interprets these raw numbers: what was happening in the economy and politics, why the Fed was doing what it was doing, what buyers and builders were actually experiencing on the ground. The table is the spine; the year pages are the flesh.
The data is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Users may reproduce, adapt, and build on the dataset provided they credit the Almanac and note that the underlying federal data (Census, NAR, Freddie Mac) is itself in the public domain. The Almanac's contribution is the assembly, alignment, and quality-control of the combined dataset — not exclusive ownership of the underlying numbers.
Notable Cycles
Four genuine peaks, four wholly different recoveries.
Scanning the full table from 1963 to 2024 reveals patterns that single-metric charts obscure.
The affordability record: The most revealing combined reading is the ratio of the median existing-home price to the 30-year fixed mortgage rate. In 2021 — the most favorable affordability combination in the 53-year rate history — the median home cost $357,100 and the rate was 2.96%, producing a monthly payment of approximately $1,199 on a 20%-down loan. In 2024 — the least favorable reading in roughly 40 years — the median home cost $408,000 and the rate was 6.84%, producing a payment of approximately $2,139. The 2024 payment is 78% higher than 2021 in nominal terms and represents a larger share of median household income than any year since 1981–1982. By this measure, 2024 is historically expensive — not because prices are uniquely high relative to long-run trends, but because the rate environment has compounded the price level into a monthly burden that exceeds historical norms.
The new-home premium: The median new home has commanded a premium over the existing-home median in every year of the record. That premium has widened over time: in 1971, the new-home median of $25,200 was 2% above the existing median of $24,800. In 2024, the new-home median of $458,200 was 12% above the existing median of $408,000. The widening premium reflects the gradual quality and size creep in new construction — the average new single-family home grew from roughly 1,500 square feet in the 1970s to over 2,500 square feet by the 2010s — as well as the geographic concentration of new construction in high-land-cost markets.
The recession pattern: NBER-designated recession years (marked in rust in the table) consistently coincide with sales troughs but not always with price troughs. In 2001, sales fell but prices continued rising. In 2008–2009, both sales and prices fell. In 2020, sales initially fell then surged within the same recession year, demonstrating that the pandemic recession's transmission through housing was unlike any prior episode. The table makes these divergences visible: reading across a recession year's row reveals whether all metrics moved together or whether the recession's impact was concentrated in volume, price, or rate.
The recovery signature: After each major sales trough — 1982, 2011 — the initial recovery is always led by new-home sales, not existing-home sales. Builders, facing carrying costs and investor pressure, tend to move inventory aggressively at the trough with concessions and price cuts. Existing homeowners, facing no such pressure, hold out for better prices. This means the first year of recovery typically shows a disproportionate uptick in the new-construction column before the existing column follows. The pattern is visible in 1983 (new sales +51% vs. existing +36%) and 2012 (new sales +20% vs. existing +9%).
Definitions
- Sales
units, K or M
- Price
median, current $
- Rate
30-yr fixed, % APR
- SAAR
Census
- EHS
NAR
- PMMS
Freddie Mac
- Recession
NBER monthly