In this article
Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →How long before buying a home in the United States costs a normal share of a household's income again? Redfin put dates on that question in a report released on Thursday 8 October 2026. Its answer is not one date but eighteen, because it depends on two things nobody controls: where mortgage rates settle and what home prices do next.
The headline case is this. If mortgage rates fell to 6% and prices kept rising at their present pace, the report puts the return to normal in November 2031, a little over five years from now. If rates fell to 6% and prices stopped rising, the date moves forward to February 2029. If rates stay between 7.25% and 8% and prices keep climbing as they are, the wait is longer than ten years.
Redfin says plainly that these are hypothetical scenarios and not forecasts. They are the firm's own modelling, and they are reported here as such.
Redfin report released 8 October 2026. All dates in this article are Redfin's modelled scenarios, not forecasts.
What Redfin means by normal
The word needs a definition before any date makes sense, and the report gives one. At national level, Redfin calls housing costs normal when the mortgage payment on a home takes the same share of household income as it did in August 2018. That share was 30%.
So the yardstick is a ratio, not a price. A home does not have to become cheaper for the ratio to fall. The payment can shrink because the rate drops, or stay still while incomes rise underneath it. Each of those routes leads to the same place in the model: a monthly payment that weighs on a household as it did in the late summer of 2018.
Related readNew South Wales: what to check before you exchange on a homeFor individual metropolitan areas the report uses a slightly different measure. There, normal means the ratio of home prices to incomes returning to its 2018 level. The logic is the same, a comparison with 2018, but the metro test looks at prices against incomes and not at the monthly payment.
The choice of 2018 as the reference year is Redfin's. A different base year would give different dates, which is one more reason to read the results as a model and not as a prediction.
Eighteen scenarios, fifteen dates
The report pairs six mortgage rates, from 6% to 8%, with three paths for home prices. In the first path, prices keep growing at 2.1% a year, the national rate Redfin reports today. In the second they stay flat. In the third they fall by 2% a year. That makes eighteen combinations. Fifteen produce a date. The other three, all of them with prices still rising, give only a wait of more than ten years.
| Mortgage rate | Prices up 2.1% a year | Prices flat | Prices down 2% a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6% | November 2031 | February 2029 | May 2028 |
| 6.5% | March 2034 | March 2030 | January 2029 |
| 7% | July 2036 | April 2031 | October 2029 |
| 7.25% | More than 10 years | October 2031 | February 2030 |
| 7.5% | More than 10 years | April 2032 | June 2030 |
| 8% | More than 10 years | May 2033 | February 2031 |
Source: Redfin report, 8 October 2026. Hypothetical scenarios, not forecasts.
The earliest date in the grid is May 2028, one year and seven months after the report. It needs both a 6% rate and prices falling 2% a year. The latest dated cell is July 2036, nine years and nine months away, with rates at 7% and prices rising as they do now. That cell sits just inside the ten-year limit beyond which Redfin stops giving a month.
The report also describes a case close to the present. With rates unchanged at about 7.5% and prices flat, it says the return to normal takes about six years. In the grid, the cell for a 7.5% rate and flat prices reads April 2032.
Related readAfter the BTO ballot in Singapore: booking, fees and key collectionWhat half a point of rate is worth
Read down the middle column, where prices stay flat, and the cost of each step in the rate becomes visible. Moving from 6% to 6.5% pushes the date from February 2029 to March 2030, which is 13 months. Moving from 6.5% to 7% adds another 13 months, to April 2031. From 7.5% to 8% the step is 13 months again, from April 2032 to May 2033. The two quarter-point steps in between, to 7.25% and then to 7.5%, add six months each.
In other words, with prices flat, each half point on the mortgage rate delays the return to normal by about a year in Redfin's model. Across the whole range, from 6% to 8%, the difference is four years and three months.
The same reading works when prices fall 2% a year, but the steps are smaller. The date moves from May 2028 at 6% to February 2031 at 8%, a spread of two years and nine months. When prices are falling and incomes rising, the ratio improves from both sides, so the rate matters a little less.
Why the price path matters even more
Read across a row and the gap is wider still. At a 6% rate, the difference between flat prices and prices growing at 2.1% a year is the difference between February 2029 and November 2031: two years and nine months. At 6.5% the gap is exactly four years, from March 2030 to March 2034. At 7% it is five years and three months, from April 2031 to July 2036. Above 7%, the rising-price column leaves the table altogether.
Related readBuying an HDB resale flat in Singapore: from HFE letter to keysThe pattern follows from how the ratio is built. A mortgage payment depends on the price of the home and on the rate. Income sits on the other side. When prices rise at 2.1% a year, incomes have to outrun that growth before the ratio improves at all, and the higher the rate, the further there is to go. When prices stand still, every rise in income counts in full.
That is the least intuitive result of the report. Price growth of 2.1% does not sound like a market running hot. Yet in Redfin's grid it is the gap between a return to normal in 2029 and one in late 2031 at the lowest rate modelled, and between 2032 and more than ten years at the rate closest to the present.
The metros closest to normal
The national figures hide large differences between cities. Using its price-to-income measure, Redfin ranks the metropolitan areas it analysed by how soon they would be back at their 2018 level. Three stand out, and all three have prices that are falling while incomes are projected to rise.
| Metro | Home prices, year over year | Projected income growth | Normal by |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Jose | -3.2% | 6.5% | October 2027 |
| Austin | -2.9% | 4.9% | February 2028 |
| Oakland | -0.3% | 6.5% | April 2028 |
Source: Redfin report, 8 October 2026. Hypothetical scenarios, not forecasts.
San Jose is the first on the list. At a 7.5% rate, Redfin's scenario has it back to normal twelve months after the report. At 6.5%, the date is November 2026, which is next month. Austin follows sixteen months after the report, and Oakland eighteen months after it.
Behind those three, the report lists Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Sacramento, Denver, Los Angeles and Fort Worth, in that order. Seven of the ten are in the western states and the other three are in Texas.
Related readBuying a home by private treaty in South Australia: Form 1 to dutyAsad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin, is quoted by the trade publication Inman as explaining the western result in those terms: prices are falling in parts of the West while the firm expects incomes to go on rising.
One western city does not fit. Inman, reporting on the same release, notes that San Francisco prices are up 9.7% year over year, which it attributes to wealth created by artificial intelligence. Oakland, on the other side of the same bay, is third on Redfin's list.
Where ten years is not enough
At the other end, the report finds that about half of the metros it analysed would need at least a decade to get back to their 2018 ratio, at mortgage rates anywhere from 6% to 8%, if their prices keep growing as they are now. It names 24 of them. They include Chicago, New York, Nassau County in New York State, Newark, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Tampa and West Palm Beach.
Most of the ten named here are in the Midwest and the Northeast, with two Florida markets alongside.
Chicago shows how a metro ends up on that list. According to Inman's account of the figures, prices there are up 5.5% year over year, against projected income growth of 3.9%. As long as the first number is larger than the second, the price-to-income ratio moves away from its 2018 level, not towards it, and no mortgage rate in the range changes that direction.
The condition matters as much as the date
The decade-long waits assume that each metro's prices keep growing at today's pace. Redfin presents every date as a hypothetical scenario, not as a forecast of what prices or rates will do.
That condition is important for anyone reading the list of 24. It does not say housing in Chicago or Philadelphia will be out of reach in 2036. It says that if nothing changes in the relation between prices and incomes there, the ratio will not have returned to its 2018 level by then.
What buyers and agents can take from it
The report speaks to the choice between buying now and waiting. Khan, in the release, describes many house hunters as feeling caught between two unattractive choices. The trade site Real Estate News reports him adding that the scenarios should give would-be buyers and sellers some hope.
What the grid offers them is not a date to plan around but a sense of proportion. Three points stand out from Redfin's figures.
- Waiting for rates alone is slow. With prices flat, even a fall to 6% leaves the return to normal two years and four months away, in February 2029.
- Prices carry more weight than they seem to. The difference between flat prices and 2.1% growth is measured in years at every rate in the table.
- The answer is local. A buyer in San Jose and a buyer in Chicago are looking at two different markets, with waits of twelve months and of more than ten years under the same 7.5% rate.
For listing agents and buyer's agents, the metro split is the practical part. A national headline about affordability returning within five years describes a scenario with a 6% rate, not the market as it stands at about 7.5%, and it describes an average. In the metros at the top of Redfin's list, the price-to-income ratio is already heading towards its 2018 level. In the 24 at the bottom, it is heading the other way.
Whether to buy or wait still depends on each household's own income, savings and plans, which no national ratio captures. The grid stands as a map of possibilities drawn on 8 October 2026, with the rate and the price path left for events to fill in.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
