Rising Rents Are Pushing Young Men Home, Out of Work, and Away From Marriage, a Study Finds

The old script of American manhood, leave home, get a job, build a life, is breaking down, and a new study points to an unexpected culprit: rent. As housing costs have surged, more noncollege-educated men are moving back in with their parents, and once there, many stop working altogether, according to research reported by Fortune.

The pattern is stark. One in six noncollege men, about 16%, now live with their parents, double the 8% rate among college-educated men. A recent working paper from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, tracks six decades of U.S. Census data and draws a direct line between rising housing costs and the decline of male labor force participation.

"There are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for noncollege-educated men in the United States," Penrose told Fortune. "Some of what we're seeing is simply rational responses to a system that's pricing them out."

Rents up 150%, wages stayed flat

Since 1960, real rents in the United States have risen about 150%, while wages for men without college degrees have barely moved, hollowed out by automation, globalization, and the collapse of manufacturing. When rents climb, more Americans get pushed back into the parental home, and men move back at nearly twice the rate of women. The share of men aged 25 to 45 living with their parents has nearly doubled since the 1960s, from 7% to about 12%. Women's rate has stayed flat at 7%.

The gap between men and women, the study found, comes down largely to children. When Penrose isolates women without college degrees who do not have kids at home, their patterns start to mirror men's almost exactly.

How rent drives the move home

The paper puts numbers on it. A 10% rise in local rents raises the likelihood that a noncollege man moves in with his parents by 1.1 percentage points. Penrose used geographic constraints like mountains, coastlines, and lakes as a research tool, isolating places where terrain limits construction and inflates housing costs for reasons unrelated to local wages or jobs. In those supply-squeezed markets, more men end up at home.

For Scott Winship, director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the finding rings true, and points at policy. "It points to a real villain in the story, which is just these land use regulations and zoning that constrain how much housing can be built," Winship told Fortune. The cruel irony, he noted, is that the most economically dynamic cities, the ones best at promoting upward mobility, are often the ones with the worst zoning bottlenecks.

Out of the home, out of the labor force

The most consequential finding is what happens after men move in. Men living with their parents are 20 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force than those living on their own. That same 10% rent increase is associated with a 0.5 percentage point drop in labor force participation, and Penrose estimates housing costs could explain roughly a third of the total employment decline among noncollege men. Among nonworking men living at home, a quarter have never held a job at all, up from one in five in 1980.

Penrose is blunt about what the data shows. "These men who are living with their parents are completely detached from the labor market," she said, pushing back on the idea that home is a temporary launchpad.

Boomer wealth is enabling it

The setup is easier to sustain now because parents can afford it. Baby boomers, sitting on decades of housing wealth, are better positioned than ever to absorb an adult child. According to Brandi Snowden of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), boomers were the largest share of recent homebuyers, and a quarter of them bought a multigenerational home, in part to house adult children who moved back or never left.

The marriage sleeper issue

Winship sees a deeper force underneath the numbers: the decline of marriage. Women now outnumber men in the workforce for the third time in history, and the overall labor force participation rate has slid to 61.5%, its lowest in decades. "In the past, a lot of these younger men and working class men would have been married, and therefore they could have tolerated higher housing costs without having to move back home," he said. "Marriage really is the sleeper issue here."

Where the rent pressure is worst

The study singles out the most expensive markets, and our data shows why. The national median rent is about $1,951 and sitting near record highs. In the cities Penrose names as needing cheaper housing, the barrier to independence is enormous: the median rent is about $4,049 in New York and about $4,253 in San Francisco, the kind of numbers that make moving out impossible for a young man on a stagnant wage. It is the same affordability wall driving the broader trend we cover in how Gen Z is affording rent and where you can live alone on $50,000 a year. Penrose's conclusion is that housing policy is labor policy: make it cheaper to live in expensive cities, and more men can rejoin the workforce.

Sources

Reporting, the working paper, and quotes: Fortune, What happens when noncollege men stay at home (2026), reporting research by Gabrielle Penrose of the American Institute for Boys and Men and citing the National Association of Realtors 2026 Generation Trends report. Rent figures: RentDataNow, June 2026.