Harris County’s housing market may have cooled, but that hasn’t made the region more affordable for local residents.
Many Harris County homeowners and renters continue to struggle with high housing costs that make homebuying more difficult and eat into a relatively large share of their income, according to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s 2026 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston report.
Multiple affordability metrics tracked by Kinder Institute researchers show a recent plateau in home sale prices hasn’t significantly altered the cost of living in Harris County. At the same time, a greater share of residents are renting instead of living in a home they own, raising the prospect of declining wealth and a reshaped residential real estate landscape.
The seventh annual State of Housing report, released Tuesday, examined dozens of affordability, household and development trends, largely relying on Census Bureau estimates and Houston Association of Realtors data. Home sale data is available through 2025, while household income and housing cost data is available through 2024.
These four charts and maps illustrate how affordability and the housing market have changed in Harris County.
Cost burden rate ticks higher
Mortgage, rent, insurance and other housing costs continue to rise faster than wages for many Harris County residents.
The share of Harris County residents considered “cost-burdened” — meaning they spent more than 30% of their household income on housing costs — hit 36.8% in 2024, up 2 percentage points from the prior year.
Harris County also recorded a small increase in the rate of “extremely cost-burdened” residents, who spent more than 50% of their household income on housing. That rate rose from 17.3% to 18.7%.
Stark gaps were once again seen between renters and homeowners, with renters roughly twice as likely to be cost-burdened or extremely cost-burdened in 2024.
For the first time on record, more than half of renters were cost-burdened in 2024, with an additional 30,000 households hitting the threshold.
The split tracks with a widening of the median household income gap between homeowners and renters, which has grown from about $30,000 in 2010 to more than $50,000 in 2024.
The median household income of renters fell by 0.3% year over year in 2024, slipping to roughly $50,700. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes declined by 3.1%.
Homeowners, meanwhile, saw their median household income rise by 6.7%, to about $106,600. That increase, however, only totaled 3.8% after adjusting for inflation.
Affordability gap slightly shrinks, remains elevated
The good news: Harris County’s affordability gap — the difference between the median home sale price and how much a median-income family can afford to spend on a home, assuming they dedicate 30% of their income to housing — fell by 16% year over year in 2025. In the city of Houston, it shrank by 7%.
The bad news: The affordability gap remains near recent record highs, totaling $109,200 in Harris County and $163,100 in Houston.
While home sale prices have plateaued since 2022, they haven’t come down after a dramatic post-pandemic spike. The median Harris County sale in 2025 totaled $320,000, up from about $230,000 in 2019.
And while wages have increased, they haven’t significantly outpaced inflation, leaving residents with relatively minimal gains in buying power.
Housing prices jump in Outer Loop, many suburbs
Nearly every Harris County neighborhood saw the median home sale price increase between 2020 and 2025, though some areas recorded particularly stark increases.
Sale prices rose by more than 50% in several of Houston’s Outer Loop neighborhoods, which are home to relatively larger populations of middle-income and Black residents.
Many communities in Harris County’s western and northern suburbs also totaled increases of 30% to 40%, among the highest in the area.
Prices climbed slightly slower in the county’s far east suburbs, as well as Pasadena, Clear Lake and southeast Houston. The city’s Inner Loop was a mixed bag, with prices falling in a few areas and rising more than 30% in others.
