Buying a home still remains out of reach for many Utahns despite affordability “slightly improving” in the state last year, according to a new report by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
“Our message today is that Utah’s housing market has stabilized slightly. But stability should not be mistaken for affordability or even satisfaction with where we’re at,” Natalie Gochnour, the institute’s director, said at the start of a panel discussion about the findings held Wednesday.
Titled the ”State of the State’s Housing Market: 2025-2026,″ the report placed Utah among the nation’s top 10 most expensive states for single-family homes, with a median-priced house costing $520,000 compared to $500,000 a year earlier.
The income needed to purchase a median-priced home in Utah was at $147,000 midyear, down about $2,000 from 2025. But the estimated average monthly mortgage payment of $3,669 still puts homeownership beyond what some 91% of renters in the state can afford.
And while homeownership in Utah continues to stay above the U.S. rate, at 68.3% of households last year compared to 65.3% nationally, the difference is dwindling. A decade ago, just under 70% of Utah households owned their homes compared to 63.7% of Americans.
‘Generational gap’ in homeownership
“Looking at those numbers, it’s hard not to be a little bit depressed,” panelist Steve Waldrip, senior housing adviser to Gov. Spencer Cox, told the audience gathered at the institute’s downtown Salt Lake City building for the discussion.
He warned that if the “generational gap” in ownership doesn’t improve, much more will be affected than the opportunity for younger Utahns to build wealth for themselves and their families.
Homeownership also “increases birth rates, it decreases teen pregnancies, it decreases crime, it increases civic participation,” Waldrip said. “All of the things we care about as a society are directly impacted by housing stability.”
Another panelist, Steven Bond, founder and CEO of Homeownership4u.org, a nonprofit that partners with developers on affordable housing projects, described working Utahns as largely stuck renting.
“Rent is on sale in Utah right now,” Bond said. “The cost of rent as it has increased is nowhere near the cost of the opportunity for homeownership, which creates a rental state,” where residents are less engaged in their communities because they are more transient.
“That’s not because they’re bad people,” he said. “It’s because they haven’t had the opportunity to own the American dream.”
Bigger homes being built
Building smaller homes on smaller lots was pitched as a way to make buying more affordable. Bond pointed out that many in the audience likely grew up without their own bedroom or a walk-in closet, features in demand today.
But panelist Troy Fitzgerald, Springville’s city administrator, said it’s difficult to get the housing market to go along. He said the Utah County community has over 2,000 lots available for development but because none are larger than 3,000 square feet, there’s little interest.
“Very, very few of them are coming out of the ground. That’s again market dynamics. They don’t want them,” Fitzgerald said. “Even on those 3,000-square-foot lots, we’re seeing 3,000-square-foot homes being built.”
Dejan Eskic, a senior research fellow at the institute and an author of the report, said the typical home size in the U.S. has jumped from around 500 square feet to some 800 square feet per person. In Utah, though, he said that number is about 950.
Where single family homes cost the most
Utah’s rank as the 10th most-expensive state last year when it comes to the median price of a single family home is relatively recent, Eskic said. From the 1970s until about a decade ago, Utah was always in the middle of the pack.
That changed as a strong economy attracted newcomers, but it was the COVID-19 pandemic “that pushed us into new levels of unaffordability,” he said. Average monthly mortgage payments, which had been $1,458 in 2016, more than doubled by 2022.
States ranked pricier than Utah were Hawaii, with a $1.08 million median sales price; California, $916,000; Washington, D.C., $775,000; Massachusetts, $696,000; Washington, $650,000; New Jersey, $589,000; New York, $587,000; Colorado, $583,000; and Oregon, $558,000.
Housing demand in Utah is likely to persist, the report stated, with an additional 280,000 homes and apartments required to accommodate a population expected to grow to more than 4 million by 2035.
At the same time, household size in Utah is anticipated to decline from about 2.91 persons in 2024 to 2.61 by 2035. With fewer people sharing a residence, the number of households would increase by roughly 11%, adding to housing demand.