By the numbers
Wisconsin house prices in the first quarter of 2026 are 67 percent higher than they were in the first quarter of 2020, data from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency show. But the rate of increase has slowed to what long had been typical in the state.
The agency publishes the House Price Index, a repeat-sales metric tracking price changes on the same single-family properties across successive sales and refinancing appraisals. The index is anchored to the first quarter of 1980. A value of 200, for instance, means that on average, houses sell for twice the price they did in 1980.
In the first quarter of 2020, the Wisconsin HPI stood at 375.1, meaning that a house worth $100,000 in 1980 would have been worth around $375,100 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the index reads 627.7, meaning that same house would be worth $627,700.
That said, the rate of price increase is returning to normal levels. After reaching a rate of increase in 2022 exceeded only once in the index’s history, in early 1983, the year-over-year growth in the Wisconsin House Price Indexdipped below 5 percent last quarter.
From the late 1980s to early 2000s, the year-over-year increase hovered around 5 percent. During the mid-2000s housing bubble, price increases reached nearly 10 percent year over year, before tumbling into negative territory over the course of the housing market crash and Great Recession. Price growth stabilized in 2017 and hovered around 5 percent until the end of 2020.
Wisconsin saw extraordinarily high rates of house price inflation in late 2021 and 2022, reaching 18.2 percent in the second quarter of 2022, the second highest level in the 51-year dataset, on par with the inflationary periods of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Wyatt Eichholz is a policy and legislative associate at the Badger Institute.
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