Buyers nationwide are putting less money down on homes than they did a year ago, according to a new analysis by Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.
The typical down payment in the U.S. was still sizable at $64,000 in March, but that’s 1.5% less than the same month in 2025, Redfin’s data showed. And the percentage of a home’s purchase price that was put down is also lower, dropping to 15% this March from 16.1% a year earlier.
The analysis is based on data from March, the most current available. The data was collected from the nation’s 40 most-populated metropolitan areas, a list that does not include any place in Utah.
There are several explanations offered for the decline:
- Home prices are ‘cooling’ in many markets
- Fewer bidding wars means less pressure to boost down payments
- Buyers are hanging on to more of their money amid continued economic uncertainty
Two years ago, a typical down payment peaked at 20% of a home’s cost, a percentage not seen since 2013. In 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic started, that typical down payment fell to just 7% from what had been a fairly stable 10% over several previous years.
The nation’s housing frenzy during the pandemic fueled a rapid rise in down payments as demand, prices and interest rates soared. Not only did the percentage of home’s cost paid as a down payment shoot up, so did the actual amount of that down payment.
In 2020, a typical down payment was as low as $23,000, according to Redfin’s data. Two years later, that amount had climbed to as much as $66,000. By 2024 and 2025, a typical down payment reached as much as $70,000.
Not every place, of course, is seeing the same change in down payments.
The amount of the typical down payment went down the most from a year ago in Nashville, Atlanta and Las Vegas. But buyers paid more in 14 of the 40 metropolitan areas in the analysis, with the largest increases in Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore.
The percentage of a home’s cost paid as a down payment fell in 18 of the 40 metropolitan areas. That percentage was highest in San Jose, San Francisco and Anaheim, and lowest in Virginia Beach, Virginia; Detroit; and Las Vegas.
The median down payment Redfin calculated for March ranged from a high of $425,000 in San Jose to a low of $6,793 in Virginia Beach. Among Utah’s neighbors, a typical buyer in Denver came up with $83,990; in Las Vegas, $30,450; and in Phoenix, $51,000.