Many Seattle area residents feel like the bar to owning a home just keeps getting higher, and they're not imagining things.

The cost of a monthly mortgage payment is now well beyond double the cost of median rent here — among the largest gaps in the country.

While the typical renter who recently moved is spending an already eye-watering $2,100 on their housing costs each month, the typical homeowner who bought recently is forking over about $4,500. That amounts to a 111% “ownership premium,” according to an analysis by the data tracking firm Apartment List.

Homeownership has always cost more than renting, but the gap between the two has soared since 2020, when ultralow mortgage rates helped bring homeownership within reach for more people. Nationally, the gap widened from 55% in 2014 to 64% in 2024, the latest data available.

“For a long time, for a large part of American households, owning a home has been the primary driver of wealth creation,” said Apartment List Chief Economist Chris Salviati, “and that's getting further and further out of reach for many folks.”

Among metro areas, only a handful rank higher than Seattle, with gaps as high as 133%. Those range from California's San Francisco and San Jose to cities like Provo, Utah, and Wichita, Kan., underscoring how America’s housing affordability challenges have reached nearly every corner of the country.

Elsewhere in Washington, Spokane-area homeowners face a median monthly cost of more than $2,600, paying 73% more than renters there.

For many renters, high costs push homeownership out of the realm of possibility. For others, the math might be workable but the decision has become more complicated.

“This divergence has made it a more difficult and nuanced question whether renting or owning is the financially better decision,” said Windermere Principal Economist Jeff Tucker.

Would-be buyers are weighing factors like stability, how long they want to stay in their home or their predictions about how the market will fare over the coming decades.

The Apartment List analysis reflects people who moved within the last year, using self-reported census data from 2024, the latest available. Homeowner costs include mortgage payments and utilities, plus other expenses such as property taxes and insurance. Renter costs include rent and utilities.

There are some caveats: While rental data is dominated by apartments, homeownership data skews toward larger, single-family homes. The calculations reflect the options typically available to renters and buyers, but they don’t control for similar-sized homes. The metro area spans Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue.

Twin trends played out in the Seattle-area housing market in recent years: Home prices and mortgage rates remain stubbornly high while rents have leveled off following an influx of new apartment construction. Apartment rents regionwide climbed from 2016 to 2023 but have been essentially flat since.

Mortgage rates now hover just above about 6%, and the median King County home sold for $960,000 last month. Those high costs make it harder for many people to afford to buy a home. A Seattle-area household earning median income here would have to spend more than half of their income on a mortgage payment and associated costs, beyond the level of debt many lenders are willing to approve.

“Homeownership isn't just housing. It's wealth building. It's permanence. It's the ability to stay in a neighborhood that you know and love for a long period of time,” said Kathleen Hosfeld, executive director of Homestead Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that uses government funding to build homes that sell below market rate.

“It's a market failure. There's an egregious mismatch between incomes and home prices,” Hosfeld said, arguing for more public funding for subsidized homeownership.

Many people struggle to afford the costs of renting, too. Nearly half of all renters in the Seattle area are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. One in four is severely cost-burdened, meaning rent eats up half of their income or more.

The struggle to afford homeownership also cuts into Americans’ feelings about the broader economy.

“It would be hard to underestimate the negative impact that this has on the household finances and consumer sentiment of, especially, younger Americans,” Tucker said. “I think this helps explain a lot of why people are so down on the economy.”

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