By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org
Like many moderate-income workers, public school teachers Julia and Scott Whitnall didn’t think they’d become homeowners in their early 30s. Especially in California.
“We never felt homeownership was in our cards. But we did it!” Julia Whitnall said. “We’re extremely happy.”
The couple moved May 16 to a $509,000 two-bedroom house in Ripon, east of San Francisco in the Central Valley region.
It wasn’t easy. Despite a relatively high combined income of $140,000 from their nearby jobs, they had to compromise on size and take on extra work at summer camps to pull it off. Then they had to exercise patience as the sellers struggled to find a new home.
High interest rates and high prices in a still-competitive housing market continue to make it tough for first-time buyers, even those with good but moderate incomes.
On a national level, households making $75,000 to $100,000 — typical of teachers, nurses and skilled trades workers in many states — face a daunting lack of homes they can afford. That’s according to new research by the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com based on listings in March of this year compared with 2024. However, the numbers showed an encouraging 20% increase in homes for sale, affordable or not.
Despite more houses for sale, those moderate-income buyers — which the report called “middle- and upper-middle-income buyers” — are much more hard-pressed to find an affordable home than they were in 2019, when almost half the homes on the market were affordable to them. This year they can afford only 21.2% of homes on the market — a slight improvement compared with 20.8% in 2024, according to the report.
It also found that a few states are improving in affordability for people in the $75,000-to-$100,000 income range. But many states are not.
The largest affordability gaps are in California, Hawaii, Idaho, Massachusetts and Montana, where such households can afford fewer than 12% of houses on the market. By contrast, they could afford about half the houses for sale in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and West Virginia.
There’s progress in states that are adding more housing at moderate price points: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida and Utah, according to the Realtors report.
Balanced markets
Nationwide, to get home markets back in line with moderate-income families, the United States needs 416,000 more homes for sale at or below $255,000, according to the report.
“In many places, we’re still seeing a huge mismatch between income levels and what’s available to buy for moderate-income families,” said Nadia Evangelou, the National Association of Realtors’ senior economist and director of real estate research.
“We are no longer in crisis mode, but we are still very far from where we need to be. We can’t fix it overnight. It will take years,” Evangelou said.
Heather, who asked not to share her last name for privacy reasons, said she can’t even think of buying a house near her job on Long Island, New York. She makes more than $100,000 as a registered nurse and her family makes $170,000 with her husband’s job in building maintenance. But $4,400 in rent and $2,000 in monthly day care costs for three children have them living paycheck to paycheck.
“We can’t even afford a small car repair, let alone a mortgage in our hometown” of Ronkonkoma in Suffolk County, Heather said. Their jobs exposed her and her husband to risks in the pandemic that her neighbors avoided with remote work, she said. But she now feels like she’s in worse shape financially than she was in 2019 and considers moving away.
“All of our hard work feels like it was for nothing,” Heather said. “It’s disheartening that we can’t afford to live where we grew up, but that’s the reality we are facing.”
Some states can still be a refuge of affordability.
Ashley and Tristan Jonas bought a $252,000 house in northwest Ohio after three years of getting shut out by higher or all-cash offers. Ashley Jonas, 32, trained as a teacher but now works in skilled trades as a project coordinator for a countertop company, and the couple makes about $140,000 with Tristan Jonas’ job as a computer programmer.
“We happened to hit the market at the right time in 2025,” Ashley Jonas said. “We bid on this house just as [President Donald] Trump was announcing tariffs. I think a lot of people were holding their coin purses. We weren’t.”
Help for teachers
Teachers, who generally make less than nurses or trades workers, are particularly squeezed. Some states, facing teacher shortages in local schools, are working to raise pay. And increasingly, some schools and hospitals are providing housing to lure more teachers and nurses.
“We lose so many teachers because they can’t find housing here,” said Autumn Rivera, a 20-year teaching veteran and 2022 Colorado Teacher of the Year. Despite her experience and credentials, Rivera said she can’t contemplate buying even a townhouse in the rural resort town of Glenwood Springs, where she teaches.
Prices for those townhouses now start in the $700,000 range, more than twice what they were when she last considered buying in 2019. Rivera feels lucky to have a reasonable rent by sharing a home with its owner, but many teachers in her Roaring Fork Schools need the 117 apartments provided by the district with affordable rent, she said. The district hopes the apartments will allow teachers to save up for a home; it has also built 14 houses for staff with Habitat for Humanity and Holy Cross Energy.
One way to make homebuying more feasible for teachers is to pay them more — a strategy that paid off for New Mexico, one of the few bright spots in a different report on teachers’ inability to afford housing, which was published this month by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group.
Beginning teachers in Albuquerque saw a 60% increase in pay between 2019 and 2025, which fell just short of a 65% jump in home prices, according to the report. The report credited a state law that raised teacher salaries, including starting pay, by $10,000.
“We’re dealing with the issue of teachers being able to live in the communities where they’re actually working,” said state Rep. Joy Garratt, a Democrat who sponsored a new law, signed in April, that sets higher minimum salaries for teachers effective July 1.
Detroit schools also gave teachers with advanced degrees a pay boost of up to 50% since 2019, about the same increase as home prices, according to the report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Albuquerque and Detroit are on the report’s list of most affordable places for beginning teachers to live.
But nationally, on average, experienced teachers who started in 2019 are less able to afford a home now than when they began, according to the report.
“Teacher pay has gone up 24% in the last five years, which some might say is solid growth, and yet the increase in house for purchase has gone up 47%,” said Heather Peske, the organization’s president.
“Housing prices are critical to being able to attract and keep great teachers,” Peske said. “People will be leaving the profession trying to find something that pays enough for housing. And bottom line, kids won’t get as good an education.”
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
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