FHFA Annual House Price Index, Census Tracts
A repeat-sales index of single-family house prices published annually for individual census tracts, which FHFA releases as a developmental series.
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The FHFA House Price Index is "a broad economic measure of the movement of single-family house prices in the United States" and "measures average price changes in sales or refinancings on the same properties" (FHFA HPI Frequently Asked Questions).
Because the method compares the same property against itself at two points in time, the index follows price movement rather than the mix of homes that happened to change hands. FHFA calls the result a "constant quality" index and contrasts it with medians and averages, which "inherently reflect changes to both the price and quantity of housing." The tract file is one of FHFA's annual indexes, which the agency produces because it uses "the all-transactions data but construct[s] indexes on a yearly basis to provide data for very small geographic areas like counties, ZIP codes, and census tracts."
A developmental series#
FHFA lists this file as "Census Tracts (Developmental Index; Not Seasonally Adjusted)" rather than as part of its flagship index suite. The agency has been explicit about the standing of tract-level house price indexes generally. (Experimental Dataset for Supertract-Based Census Tract HPIs FAQ). That research dataset is a separate product from the annual file used here, but the caution applies to the same underlying difficulty: at tract scale there are often few repeat transactions in a year, and FHFA notes that where indices are "estimated at a very granular level, there will be cases where statistical noise is high." Treat these figures as indicative of local price direction, not as precise valuations.
Coverage#
Annual values from 2010 through the most recent release, covering roughly 64,000 census tracts.
"Most recent release" is not the same as today. FHFA publishes on a lag and revises history with each update, for three stated reasons: repeat transactions change measured appreciation for prior periods, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy seasoned loans that carry new information about earlier periods, and origination data reach FHFA with a two-month delay. Recent years move the most.
Geography#
The file is published directly for census tracts, identified by 11-digit tract codes, so no reassignment from a larger area is involved. Coverage is not universal: a tract appears only where enough repeat transactions exist to estimate an index, so a substantial share of US tracts carry no value at all, and rural and thinly transacted areas are the most likely to be missing.
Other considerations#
The index is nominal and is not adjusted for inflation. It is not seasonally adjusted, and at annual frequency there is nothing seasonal to remove.
Each tract's index is normalized to its own base year, so index levels are not comparable between tracts. Only changes within a tract carry meaning, which is why the measures built here are all rates of change or dispersion of those changes.
The transaction sample is drawn from mortgage activity, weighted toward conforming conventional loans. Segments financed differently, including all-cash purchases, are represented unevenly.
Metrics built on this source#
Citation#
Source: FHFA House Price Index® (annual indexes, census tracts, developmental index, not seasonally adjusted), https://www.fhfa.gov/data/hpi
FHFA states that HPI data "are freely available for download" and suggests "at least an attribution like 'Source: FHFA HPI®' or 'Source: FHFA House Price Index®.'" Birdseye figures derived from this series are our own estimates; FHFA is the source of the original index data only and is not responsible for our calculations.
References#
- 1Federal Housing Finance Agencyhttps://www.fhfa.gov/data/hpi
- 2FHFA HPI Frequently Asked Questionshttps://www.fhfa.gov/faqs/hpi
- 3Experimental Dataset for Supertract-Based Census Tract HPIs FAQhttps://fhfa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/wp2101-faqs.pdf