Why Fewer Renters Are Moving Even Though Most Still Want to Own a Home
The Lease Nobody Wants to Break
A decade ago, a renter signing a twelve-month lease treated it as a placeholder. Something better, cheaper, or closer to a new job was probably a year away. That assumption has quietly collapsed. Renter mobility has fallen so far that today’s renters are far more likely to resign the same lease, in the same building, on the same block, than they were in 2014 — not because they love the apartment, but because the alternative feels riskier than staying put.
The number behind that shift is stark. Only 37% of U.S. renters now expect to move within the next three years, down from 57% just over a decade ago. That is not a small dip in a noisy survey. It is a structural change in how a third of American households think about where they live.
What the New York Fed Measured
This finding comes from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, tracked through its Liberty Street Economics research series. The survey doesn’t just ask people if they moved — it asks them to estimate the probability they’ll move in the next three years, then checks how well that expectation predicts what actually happens. Historically, it has predicted actual moves quite well, which is what makes the drop from 57% to 37% more than a mood swing. It’s a forward-looking signal, and it’s been sliding for years, not months.
Homeowners answered the same question, and their expected mobility fell too, from 21% to 14%. But the decline among renters was steeper, both in absolute terms and relative to where they started. Renters are supposed to be the mobile half of the housing market. That gap is narrowing.
Why This Is Surfacing Now
The renter mobility data has drawn fresh attention because it lands at the same moment mortgage rates remain roughly double what they were in 2021, squeezing the traditional path from renting into ownership. That single affordability shock has rippled into a broader housing conversation touching everything from single-family construction to how landlords plan their leasing calendars.
The Homeownership Door Is Closing Slower Than People Think
Ask a renter in 2015 whether they expected to eventually own a home, and 52% said yes. Ask that same question in 2025, and the figure has fallen to 35%. That’s not a small erosion of optimism — it’s nearly a third of the belief in eventual homeownership evaporating in ten years.
The mechanism is straightforward once you look at what renters expect mortgages to cost. In 2021, renters’ median expectation for a mortgage rate was about 3.3%. By recent surveys, that expectation had climbed to nearly 6.8% — more than double. At the same time, the share of renters who see securing a mortgage as very difficult jumped from 27% in 2021 to 45% in 2024.
Put those two numbers together and the picture sharpens. Renters aren’t just facing higher rates; they’re facing a market where getting approved at all feels less certain than it did a few years ago. That combination doesn’t just delay a home purchase. It changes the logic of moving altogether.
Why Believing You Can Buy Changes Whether You Move at All
Here is the detail that explains why affordability sentiment bleeds into apartment turnover, not just home sales. Renters who believed they could easily secure a mortgage reported a 66% probability of moving within three years. Renters who expected mortgage difficulty reported just 42%.
That’s a 24-point gap driven entirely by perception of financing access, not by whether someone actually wants to relocate. Many renters have mentally bundled two decisions into one: moving and buying. If buying feels out of reach, the whole plan gets shelved — including the more modest move to a different rental unit across town for a better commute or a bigger bedroom.
This is the piece that gets lost in conversations framed purely around single-family ownership. The renter mobility slide isn’t just a story about who can buy a house. It’s a story about how a stalled path to ownership freezes decisions up and down the entire rental market.
A Trend Older Than the Pandemic, Accelerated By It
It would be a mistake to treat this purely as a post-2021 mortgage-rate story. Annual household moving rates in the U.S. have been falling since the mid-1980s, when roughly one in five households moved each year. By 2019 — before any pandemic disruption, before any rate shock — that figure had already dropped below one in ten.
The pandemic didn’t create this trend. It stepped on the accelerator. Renter mobility expectations fell faster after 2020 than the multi-decade trend line would have predicted, and rising mortgage rates alongside surging home prices are the most plausible explanation for that extra drop. This matters for how anyone should read the current data: even if mortgage rates ease, the longer arc of declining American mobility isn’t going to fully reverse. Some of this is structural, not cyclical.
What Fewer Move-Outs Means for the Buildings People Live In
For an owner of a multifamily property, tenant turnover has always been a two-sided coin. Every move-out is a headache — a vacant unit, a leasing push, a marketing spend — but it’s also an opportunity. A unit that turns over is a unit whose rent gets reset to market rate. In markets where rents were climbing, turnover was often a landlord’s fastest route to higher revenue per unit.
That mechanism weakens when mobility falls this far. Renters make up roughly one-third of U.S. households, and if a meaningfully smaller share of them cycle through their leases every three years, the entire rhythm of a leasing office changes. Renewal rates climb, which sounds like good news, and in one sense it is: occupancy improves and turnover costs drop. But leasing teams built around a certain pace of unit turnover — staffing, marketing budgets, projected rent growth — now face longer stretches between the chances to reset a lease to current market pricing.
Value-add investment strategies feel this most acutely. The classic playbook renovates units as tenants leave and re-leases at a premium. If tenants aren’t leaving, that playbook slows down, unit by unit, building by building.
The Underwriting Problem Nobody Priced In
Multifamily investors build financial models on assumptions about how often units turn over and how fast rents grow as a result. Those models were largely built during, or shaped by memory of, decades when annual turnover was a given. A renter expectation of moving that now sits below 40% — down from 57% just over ten years ago — is a different world for those spreadsheets to operate in.
This is where the story moves past the ownership debate entirely. It’s tempting to read renter mobility numbers as simply a proxy for who can or can’t afford a house. But the more durable implication is for the people who own and operate rental housing as a business. Rent growth assumptions tied to frequent turnover deserve a second look. So do occupancy projections, staffing models for leasing offices, and underwriting on acquisitions premised on aggressive value-add repositioning.
Where the Renter Gets Stuck
Step back from the spreadsheets and the picture is a household making a rational calculation with worse inputs than it had a few years ago. A renter weighing whether to move isn’t just asking ‘do I want a change.’ They’re asking whether moving gets them closer to owning eventually, and whether that math still works.
When 45% of renters believe a mortgage would be very difficult to secure, and the expected rate on that mortgage has roughly doubled since 2021, the rational response isn’t to move more aggressively in search of a better rental deal. It’s to sit still, keep the lease that already works, and wait for the numbers to improve. That instinct, multiplied across a third of American households, is what shows up in the New York Fed’s data as a structural decline rather than a blip.
What Doesn’t Change, and What Might
Despite everything above, the desire to own hasn’t disappeared. About 65% of renters still say they want to buy a home if they can afford it. That’s the detail that separates this from a story about renters giving up on ownership. This is a story about renters being priced and rate-shocked out of a plan they still hold.
Lower interest rates would likely improve sentiment and, by extension, expected mobility — the survey data show sentiment and mobility expectations move together closely. But rates alone won’t solve it. Home prices remain elevated, and mortgage qualification standards aren’t loosening on their own. A rapid rebound in renter mobility looks unlikely on the current evidence, even under a friendlier rate environment.
For owners and operators of rental housing, the practical response isn’t to wait this out. It’s to build a business around resident retention rather than assume turnover will return to its old rhythm, revisit operating budgets that were sized for a higher-churn world, and watch affordability data as closely as rent comps — because in this market, the mortgage math renters do in their heads is now doing a lot of the work that used to belong to local rental demand alone.
FAQ
What is renter mobility and why is it declining?
Renter mobility refers to how likely renters are to move within a given period, typically measured as the probability of moving within three years. It has declined because renters increasingly see homeownership as financially out of reach, given higher mortgage rates and stricter qualification expectations, so they are choosing to stay in their current rental rather than relocate.
How much has renter mobility fallen compared to a decade ago?
According to New York Fed survey data, the share of renters expecting to move within three years fell from 57% in 2014 to 37% in early 2026, a drop of 20 percentage points among the same demographic group.
Does declining renter mobility mean people don’t want to own homes anymore?
No. About 65% of renters still say they want to buy a home if they can afford it. The decline in mobility reflects affordability barriers, particularly mortgage rate expectations and perceived difficulty qualifying for a loan, rather than a loss of interest in homeownership itself.
How does lower renter mobility affect landlords and property managers?
Lower mobility means fewer unit turnovers, which can improve occupancy and renewal rates but reduces opportunities to reset rents to market rates. It also lengthens the intervals between leasing pushes, which affects staffing, marketing budgets, and revenue models built around regular turnover.
Will renter mobility increase if mortgage rates drop?
Lower rates would likely improve sentiment and could modestly raise expected mobility, since renter perceptions of mortgage affordability closely track their moving plans. However, elevated home prices and strict qualification standards mean a rapid rebound in mobility is considered unlikely even if rates ease.
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