First-time buyers made up 22% of U.S. home purchases in the year through June 2026, up a point from the record low of 21% a year earlier. Their median age held at an all-time high of 40, and a record 10% of them paid all cash. Those are the headline findings of the National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, which the trade group released on Nov. 5.
The one-point gain is small. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 1.16 percentage points, so on our reading the change is hard to tell apart from noise. NAR’s research chief also played it down. “The share of first-time buyers is still about half the historical norm of 40% seen before 2008,” said Jessica Lautz, NAR’s deputy chief economist and vice president of research. She added that buyers saving on their own “continue to face high rent, student debt, and a shortage of homes they can afford.”
NAR’s report page says the share rose “slightly” after “a short-lived drop in mortgage rates briefly improved housing affordability” during the survey period.
Inheritance enters the first-time buyer story
The biggest change this year is where first-time buyers’ money comes from. NAR found that 10% of them paid all cash, the highest share on record. Among those cash buyers, 28% used an inheritance, compared with 9% of first-time buyers who took out a mortgage. Across all first-time buyers, 10% used an inheritance toward the down payment, also a record.
The cash buyers are much older. Their median age was 54, against 38 for first-time buyers who financed.
“The housing market is beginning to see a generational transfer of wealth. It’s not yet a tsunami, but it is changing who can buy a first home and when,” Lautz said. “Because people are living longer, the generation receiving that wealth is no longer young adults. Many are reaching middle age before they can buy their first home.”
For most first-time buyers, personal savings was still the main source of a down payment, cited by 62%, up from 59% in the 2025 profile. Next came financial assets such as a 401(k), stocks or cryptocurrency (30%, up from 26%) and gifts or loans from family and friends (25%, up from 22%). The median first-time down payment slipped to 9% from 10% last year.
Repeat buyers still dominate
Repeat buyers made 78% of purchases, down from 79% a year earlier. Their median age matched the record of 62, and 30% paid all cash, the same share as in 2025. Their median household income rose to $127,000 from $111,700. Their median down payment fell to 19% from 23%.
“Repeat buyers are driving the housing market,” Lautz said. “Unlike first-time home buyers, repeat buyers have seen their housing equity grow rapidly over the past decade, enabling them to trade up for larger homes or move into more desirable locations. These are often moves by choice rather than necessity.”
Across all buyers, the median age dipped to 58 from 59. The share with children under 18 at home rose to 26% from 24%, which NAR called an all-time low last year. Fourteen percent bought a multigenerational home, and a record 4% bought with roommates who were not romantic partners. Fourteen percent bought to be closer to friends and family, up from 6% in 2000.
Sellers are staying longer
Owners who sold had been in their homes a median of 12 years, a new high, up from 11 years in last year’s profile. They moved a median of 30 miles. The most common reason for selling was to move closer to friends and family, cited by 22%. Fewer sellers traded into a newer home (47%, down from 50%), and more moved into a larger one (36%, up from 34%).
Longer tenure fits the supply squeeze described in other recent data. Realtor.com said contract signings hit a record October low even as listings topped 1.18 million. Redfin reported sellers outnumbering buyers by 63% in September. The NAR profile covers a different period and measures who bought, not how many, so the figures do not line up directly. Still, the picture is consistent: there are fewer buyers, and owners who have little reason to move are holding on.
Agent use at a four-decade high
The profile is also NAR’s yearly measure of how much consumers use agents. This year’s numbers will be read closely, because it is the second edition whose survey window falls largely after the August 2024 practice changes that followed the commission settlements. Ninety percent of buyers used an agent or broker, up from 88%. Among buyers of previously owned homes, 93% did, up from 92%. Ninety-two percent of sellers used an agent, which NAR called an all-time high, up from 91%. For-sale-by-owner deals were 5% of sales, matching the record low.
One figure went the other way. Eighty-eight percent of buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend them, down from 91% a year earlier.
“Agent use among buyers and sellers is at its highest level in four decades,” Lautz said. “This might seem counterintuitive given consumers have access to more information than ever before. However, all that information can be misleading without proper context.”
NAR has an obvious stake in that conclusion. Its members are the agents the survey counts, and the profile is a survey of buyers, not a census of transactions. Even so, NAR calls the profile the longest-running series of national data on recent buyers and sellers, and says it has published the report since 1981.
How the survey was done
NAR sent a 121-question survey in July 2026 to 228,250 recent buyers, using a random sample weighted by geography. It reached them by mail, by text to a subsample of 200,000 and by email to 50,000. It received 7,125 responses from people who bought a primary residence between July 2025 and June 2026, an adjusted response rate of 3.1%. The results cover owner-occupants only; investor and vacation-home purchases are excluded. Highlights are on NAR’s report page, and the full report is free for members.
For the industry, the takeaway is less about the one-point rise than about who is buying. The buyers coming in later in life increasingly bring family money. Those without it still face a market NAR itself describes as short on homes they can afford. More national data is on our housing market page.
