Home value (Census)
The median value of owner-occupied homes in a tract, as estimated by the owners themselves, and its change over time.
The Census Bureau defines value as "the respondent's estimate of how much the property (house and lot, mobile home and lot (if lot owned), or condominium unit) would sell for if it were for sale." Where the house is owned but the land is not, "the respondent was asked to estimate the combined value of the house and the land." The median "divides the value distribution into two equal parts: one-half of the cases falling below the median value of the property … and one-half above the median" (ACS Subject Definitions).
The figure covers owner-occupied units only. Rented homes have no reported value, so a tract that is mostly rental is represented by whatever owner-occupied stock it contains.
This is an owner's opinion of price, not a transaction. Nobody sold anything to produce it. That makes it available for every tract in the country, including tracts with almost no sales activity, and it makes it a soft measure. For a series built from actual repeat transactions, see home price appreciation.
Metrics in this family#
Median home value
The current median, taken from the most recent 5-year vintage, in dollars.
Median home value trend
Change in that median over 3, 5, or 10 years, chosen in the tool.
Because home value is a dollar amount, its trend is reported as a percentage change. Dollar changes are not comparable between a tract of modest homes and a tract of expensive ones; percentage changes are.
Considerations#
Owner estimates are known to respond to sentiment as well as to market conditions, and owners in different places may err in different directions. Read the level as a self-assessed valuation rather than an appraisal.
The Bureau computes the median on a standard distribution whose top interval is "$2,000,000 or more," so tract medians cannot resolve above that point. The most expensive tracts in the country are compressed against that ceiling.
The Bureau labels its published median income and median rent as inflation-adjusted to the final year of each estimate period, but labels median value simply as dollars (ACS variable metadata). A value trend therefore carries general price inflation inside it, and is not directly comparable to the real-terms trends on the income and rent pages.
ACS 5-year windows overlap. Each vintage shares four of its five years with the vintage before it, so year-over-year movement reflects smoothed rolling estimates rather than independent annual readings, and turning points appear later than they occurred. The 5-year and 10-year trends compare vintages whose windows do not overlap; the 3-year trend compares vintages sharing two years and is damped.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census. Estimates published on earlier boundaries are carried onto current ones before use — see geography.
Tracts with few owner-occupied homes carry a wide margin of error, and some have no published median at all.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf
- 2ACS variable metadatahttps://api.census.gov/data/2024/acs/acs5/variables.html