Nearly half of young adults now live with parents, Fed survey finds

Nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 29 live with their parents, according to a new Federal Reserve survey, a sign that high costs and a tough early-career job market are changing how young adults start independent lives. Economists say the shift could affect homebuying, family formation and local economies for years.

The Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 found that 49% of adults under 30 live with their parents. The figure is up 12 percentage points from 2019, according to the data cited by Fortune.

The Fed survey also found that 47% of adults in the same age group received help from someone outside their household to cover expenses such as phone bills, housing costs or general living needs. Laura Ullrich, director of economics at Indeed Hiring Lab and a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, told Fortune those two groups should not be treated as identical because young adults living with parents and young adults receiving outside financial help may overlap only partly.

Family support is stretching beyond recent graduates

Ullrich said the findings point to a broad reliance on parents and other relatives at a stage when many adults historically formed their own households. She has studied household formation trends for years and told Fortune the slowdown carries effects beyond individual family budgets.

When young adults postpone moving out, she said, typical ages for marriage and first children rise, fertility rates fall and home purchases are delayed. Ullrich also said those changes can affect school enrollment, housing markets and retirement patterns.

The pressure is not limited to people in their 20s. The same Fed survey found that 26% of adults ages 30 to 44 received financial help from outside their household, according to Ullrich’s comments to Fortune.

Fortune also cited a separate Wells Fargo survey from earlier this year in which 64% of parents with Gen Z children ages 18 to 28 said their children still depended on them financially. That support was concentrated in essentials such as rent and phone bills, Fortune reported.

Housing, inflation and jobs are part of the strain

Ullrich linked the rise in young adults living at home to broader economic pressures, including housing affordability, inflation and the difficulty some young workers face in securing a first job. She said those conditions make the increase unsurprising.

She also cautioned that the Fed survey question may count some college students in ways that vary by timing. The SHED survey asks whether adult children live with respondents, and Ullrich told Fortune that parents of students away at school for much of the year may answer differently depending on when they are asked.

Even with that caveat, Ullrich said the longer-term increase is clear. She also pointed to the Fed’s measure of household financial comfort, tracked by FRED, which showed the share of households saying they were doing okay or living comfortably rose to 78% in 2021 before settling at 72% to 73% in recent years.

Ullrich attributed the 2021 jump to pandemic-era stimulus payments and expanded unemployment benefits, rather than a lasting improvement in household finances. She told Fortune the steadiness of the measure since then is notable given inflation, while the decline in comfort has been concentrated among people without a high school diploma.

For some families, keeping an adult child at home while they search for work may be a rational financial choice, Ullrich said. Across the economy, she said, many such choices can reshape where young adults live, when they buy homes and how their lifetime earnings develop.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.