“People move every seven years” is one of those figures that gets repeated because nobody wants to be the one to check it. We can check it. Reading the last recorded sale on every single-family home in the country, the median owner-occupant has been in the same house for 9.8 years, and a quarter of them have been there twenty years or more. All figures derived August 29, 2026 across 52,897,438 owner-occupied homes; methodology at the bottom.
How long owners have actually been in place
The distribution matters more than the median, because it is not a bell curve. It has a fat middle and a very long right tail — the people who bought a house and simply stopped moving.
| Time in the home | Share of owner-occupied homes |
|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 4.4% |
| 1 to 3 years | 9.8% |
| 3 to 5 years | 11.4% |
| 5 to 10 years | 25.3% |
| 10 to 20 years | 24.5% |
| 20 to 30 years | 17.6% |
| 30 years or more | 7.0% |
Half of all owner-occupants sit between 4.9 and 19.8 years in the home. The mean is 12.9 years against a median of 9.8, and that gap is entirely the 24.6% who have passed twenty years. Any plan built on “the average homeowner” is really a plan built on two different populations: a churning third that moves inside a decade, and a settled quarter that does not move at all.
Tenure is a map of the Northeast versus the Sun Belt
Maryland’s median owner has been in place 13.4 years. Idaho’s has been in place 6.3. That is more than a two-to-one spread between states, and the pattern is not subtle: the eight longest-tenured states are all Northeast or Mid-Atlantic, and the shortest are the states that built the most new houses in the last fifteen years.
California at 12.3 years is the interesting one, because it is the only high-growth state near the top. Proposition 13 caps the assessed value of a home until it changes hands, which makes moving expensive in a way that has nothing to do with the price of the next house — and 30.3% of California owner-occupants have now been in place for twenty years or more.
| State | Single-family homes | Sale-date coverage | Median years in home | 20+ years | Under 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maryland | 1,290,128 | 90.0% | 13.4 | 37.5% | 10.8% |
| Connecticut | 850,747 | 79.5% | 13.1 | 35.9% | 9.6% |
| New York | 3,260,488 | 70.0% | 13.0 | 31.5% | 7.4% |
| Pennsylvania | 3,266,450 | 78.8% | 12.9 | 35.2% | 11.7% |
| Massachusetts | 1,455,883 | 83.8% | 12.7 | 33.8% | 9.7% |
| Delaware | 316,033 | 81.6% | 12.4 | 33.1% | 11.0% |
| California | 7,328,020 | 79.0% | 12.3 | 30.3% | 10.7% |
| New Jersey | 2,075,162 | 86.9% | 12.2 | 35.0% | 11.7% |
| Rhode Island | 248,556 | 75.8% | 12.0 | 32.0% | 10.5% |
| Ohio | 3,512,691 | 86.2% | 11.4 | 32.2% | 13.5% |
| New Hampshire | 385,270 | 67.4% | 11.4 | 27.5% | 6.4% |
| District of Columbia | 48,523 | 72.0% | 11.3 | 27.4% | 11.8% |
| Illinois | 2,749,020 | 75.7% | 11.0 | 28.1% | 10.1% |
| Michigan | 3,238,518 | 71.6% | 10.6 | 25.4% | 13.3% |
| Tennessee | 2,138,451 | 89.2% | 10.3 | 28.8% | 14.3% |
| Mississippi | 881,753 | 67.7% | 10.1 | 25.2% | 12.7% |
| Kentucky | 1,176,586 | 73.1% | 10.0 | 27.3% | 13.9% |
| Vermont | 195,650 | 66.7% | 10.0 | 25.0% | 14.0% |
| Washington | 1,950,530 | 83.3% | 10.0 | 25.1% | 13.2% |
| Kansas | 940,440 | 62.8% | 9.7 | 24.7% | 14.5% |
| Montana | 353,405 | 65.5% | 9.7 | 22.0% | 15.8% |
| Alaska | 157,636 | 76.1% | 9.3 | 18.7% | 14.4% |
| North Carolina | 3,091,818 | 84.6% | 9.3 | 25.0% | 15.0% |
| Colorado | 1,609,614 | 90.3% | 9.2 | 24.6% | 16.2% |
| Virginia | 2,337,733 | 71.2% | 9.2 | 21.7% | 15.3% |
| Oregon | 1,109,268 | 84.5% | 9.1 | 21.9% | 14.4% |
| Louisiana | 1,352,546 | 69.4% | 9.1 | 18.8% | 15.6% |
| Arizona | 1,999,499 | 92.3% | 9.0 | 20.9% | 14.3% |
| Georgia | 3,076,712 | 89.4% | 8.9 | 23.2% | 15.9% |
| Oklahoma | 1,325,173 | 83.0% | 8.8 | 20.9% | 17.3% |
| Nevada | 811,250 | 93.8% | 8.8 | 18.5% | 15.8% |
| Iowa | 1,023,969 | 76.2% | 8.7 | 19.1% | 17.9% |
| Nebraska | 636,544 | 75.1% | 8.7 | 17.0% | 16.3% |
| Florida | 5,700,915 | 90.9% | 8.7 | 22.9% | 16.6% |
| Arkansas | 1,054,052 | 89.0% | 8.6 | 21.9% | 17.4% |
| Texas | 8,372,254 | 83.9% | 8.6 | 19.4% | 16.4% |
| Alabama | 1,619,443 | 73.5% | 8.6 | 20.9% | 17.2% |
| Minnesota | 1,670,947 | 67.9% | 8.5 | 16.9% | 17.0% |
| Wisconsin | 1,365,836 | 63.1% | 8.4 | 13.5% | 15.9% |
| New Mexico | 377,972 | 67.6% | 8.3 | 15.9% | 16.2% |
| South Carolina | 1,603,386 | 80.8% | 8.1 | 17.9% | 16.3% |
| Missouri | 1,735,053 | 75.1% | 8.1 | 17.6% | 17.9% |
| North Dakota | 87,465 | 68.4% | 7.6 | 7.4% | 18.2% |
| Indiana | 2,180,369 | 69.4% | 7.5 | 10.8% | 18.7% |
| Utah | 714,181 | 85.2% | 7.0 | 13.2% | 17.2% |
| Idaho | 619,982 | 76.1% | 6.3 | 7.2% | 22.3% |
Four states and two territories are missing from that table because fewer than 60% of their homes carry a usable sale date: South Dakota, West Virginia, Maine, Hawaii and Wyoming. Their absence says nothing about how long their owners stay.
The county spread is three to one
Counties separate further than states do. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the median owner-occupant has held the house 18.4 years. In Marion County, Florida — retirement country north of Orlando — the median is 6.1. Same country, same year, three times the turnover.
| Longest-held counties | Homes | Median years |
|---|---|---|
| Bucks County, PA | 156,855 | 18.4 |
| New Castle County, DE | 160,455 | 17.5 |
| Luzerne County, PA | 101,881 | 17.1 |
| Queens County, NY | 150,292 | 16.8 |
| Prince George’s County, MD | 175,528 | 15.4 |
| Allegheny County, PA | 375,522 | 15.3 |
| Delaware County, PA | 130,504 | 15.2 |
| York County, PA | 122,734 | 15.2 |
| Montgomery County, PA | 220,623 | 15.0 |
| San Diego County, CA | 578,329 | 14.7 |
| Fastest-turning counties | Homes | Median years |
|---|---|---|
| Marion County, FL | 142,768 | 6.1 |
| Utah County, UT | 147,564 | 6.2 |
| Pinal County, AZ | 157,456 | 6.2 |
| Ada County, ID | 176,691 | 6.3 |
| St. Johns County, FL | 108,589 | 6.3 |
| Horry County, SC | 138,113 | 6.7 |
| Montgomery County, TX | 215,628 | 6.8 |
| Pasco County, FL | 203,779 | 6.9 |
| Williamson County, TX | 206,737 | 7.0 |
| Bell County, TX | 109,359 | 7.0 |
Six of the ten longest-held counties are in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Seven of the ten fastest-turning are in Florida, Texas and the interior West. Both lists are restricted to counties with at least 100,000 single-family homes and 75% sale-date coverage, so these are big places, not statistical accidents.
About one home in twenty-five changes hands each year
3,343,531 single-family homes — 3.9% of the stock — last sold within the trailing twelve months. 18,640,552, or 21.9%, have changed hands in the last five years. That is the real size of the annual addressable market for anything that gets bought when someone moves: roughly one street in twenty-five, every year, spread unevenly.
Unevenly is the operative word. In Idaho, 22.3% of owner-occupants arrived in the last three years. In New Hampshire it is 6.4%. A move-in-triggered offer is three and a half times denser in one than in the other, and no amount of creative targeting closes that gap.
What a settled quarter of the country means in practice
The long tail is the part that changes decisions. If a quarter of owner-occupants have been in place twenty years, then a quarter of the housing stock is sitting on original equipment that has aged past its service life while its owner has never once shopped for a replacement — roofs, HVAC, water heaters, panels, windows. Those homes are invisible to every marketing channel keyed to a recent move.
Conversely, the fastest-turning counties supply a constant stream of new owners who arrive with a punch list and an unusual willingness to spend, and who have no incumbent contractor relationship. Both are real markets. They are almost exactly the opposite market, and the same campaign will not work on both.
The practical version is to stop treating tenure as demographic background and start using it as a filter, alongside the age of the thing you actually sell. A twelve-year owner in a 1998 house is a different conversation from a one-year owner in the same house, and the deed record already tells you which one is behind the door.
Methodology
- Source and universe. Scout Data’s production property database, restricted to active single-family residences — 85,061,162 homes. Sale dates come from county assessor and recorder records.
- The denominator. 67,844,588 homes (79.8%) carry a usable last-sale date. 12,222,033 carry the 1900-01-01 placeholder that means “date not recorded”, 4,994,540 carry no date at all, and exactly one is dated in the future; all are excluded rather than counted as very long tenure. Every headline figure is further restricted to the 52,897,438 of those homes flagged owner-occupied, because tenure is a question about people living in houses.
- Tenure is current, not completed. This measures how long today’s owner has held the home so far. It is a censored measurement: a family three years into a thirty-year stay counts as three. Published tenure figures usually measure sellers at the moment of sale, which is a different quantity and runs higher. The two are not interchangeable and should not be compared directly.
- Why the number is a floor. Where a jurisdiction has not carried old sales forward, the missing records are disproportionately old ones — which removes long-tenured owners from the count and pulls the median down. That is why the state table shows coverage next to the median, and why states below 60% coverage are excluded entirely.
- Coverage is not the ranking. We checked that the state order is not an artifact of recording rates: Maryland tops the table at 90% coverage, New York is second at 70%, and Idaho sits last at 76%. High-coverage and low-coverage states appear at both ends.
- Exact medians. Every median here is an exact quantile. The sampled median that most analytics engines use by default moved individual state figures by up to half a year between identical runs, which is not a difference you want inside a published table.
- County rule. County tables include only counties with at least 100,000 single-family homes and at least 75% sale-date coverage.
Derived August 29, 2026. Spot something that looks wrong? Tell us — we’d rather correct a number than defend it.
Companion pages: corporate ownership of single-family homes covers who owns the homes that are not owner-occupied, solar permits that never got installed covers a different kind of record mismatch on the same stock, and roof replacement statistics covers how long the roof lasts over the same stock.
Frequently asked questions
How long does the average person stay in their home?
Across 52.9 million owner-occupied single-family homes with a usable sale date, the median owner has been in place 9.8 years and the average is 12.9 — the gap is the long tail of people who never move. About a quarter have been in the same house for twenty years or more, and 4.4% arrived within the last twelve months.
Why is this lower than the tenure figures I have seen elsewhere?
Most published figures measure completed tenure — how long sellers had owned when they sold — which only counts people who moved. This page measures every owner in place today, including the ones who have been there two years and will be there twenty. It also runs on assessor sale records, where a jurisdiction that stopped recording old sales leaves long-tenured owners out of the count. Both effects push the number down, so treat 9.8 years as a floor.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes — cite freely with a link to this page. The figures come from Scout Data’s own property database and the methodology section states exactly what is counted and what is left out.