Wisconsin homeownership rate

By the numbers

Home ownership — a key ambition of Wisconsinites pursing the American Dream — is much lower than it was 20 years ago in the Badger State.

Only 69% of households owned the property they lived in last year, according to 2023 U.S. Census data.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The homeownership rate is considered a comprehensive metric of how well our socioeconomic system “is ‘delivering the goods’ for the typical American family,” explained Don Layton for the Joint Center on Housing Studies of Harvard University in a 2021 essay.

According to Layton, higher rates of homeownership reflect larger household incomes combined with affordable mortgages. Homeownership itself tends to improve a family’s quality of life and serves as a vehicle for building wealth for retirement or the next generation.

The homeownership rate is calculated by dividing the number of owner-occupied housing units by the total number of occupied housing units. In other words, it’s a measure of how many households are homeowners.

The data show that the homeownership rate in Wisconsin has fluctuated within a narrow band between 64% and 74% over the past four decades.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The rate reached its lowest level of that period in 1985 at 63.8% and peaked at 73.3% in 2004. Since then, Wisconsin charted a generally downward trajectory, reaching its lowest mark in decades in 2019 at 66.1%. While the rate recovered slightly in the years since the pandemic, quarterly figures seem to suggest that the trend has stalled. In the third quarter of 2024, the rate was back down to 67.3%.

Census data compiled by the Federal Reserve economic data service provide county-specific homeownership rates as well. In 2022, the most recent year in the dataset, Milwaukee County’s homeownership rate was 53%. The rate in Dane County was 63.2%, in Waukesha 82.3%, in Ozaukee 78.6%, and in Washington County 81.9%.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Nationally, the homeownership rate is 65.6%. The Midwest as a whole has the highest rate of the country’s regions at 70.1% for the third quarter of 2024. The South is second at 67.2%, followed by the Northeast at 62.2% and the West at 61%.

When the national statistics are broken down by age, the bracket with the highest homeownership rate is 70- to 74-year-olds, with an 80.7% homeownership rate. Rates steadily decrease for younger brackets. Less than half of 30- to 34-year-old householders are homeowners, and just 32.6% of 25- to 29-year-olds are.