The Highest Since 1996: More Young Adults Live With Their Parents Than at Any Point on Record

Moving out of the family home has long been seen as a key step into adulthood. For a growing number of young adults, it is a step that is being delayed, and the trend stretches back much further than a single year.

Researchers at Bird & Co have analysed three decades of official data on living arrangements to understand how many 20 to 34 year olds live with their parents and how that has changed since the 1990s. To explore one possible reason behind the trend, they then compared the cost of a deposit with the cost of renting across the country, using current figures on private rents and house prices.

The highest level since records began in 1996

Close to 3.8 million people aged 20 to 34 live now with their parents in the UK. That is the highest number recorded since this data series began in 1996, and at 29% it is also the highest share on record.

The longer view shows how much has changed. In 1996, about 2.7 million young adults aged 20 to 34 lived with their parents, around one in five. The figure dipped in the late 1990s, then climbed steadily through the 2000s and 2010s to reach nearly three in ten today. Across that period, the number rose by more than 40%, an increase of over a million people.

This is not simply the result of there being more young adults. The 20 to 34 population grew by less than 4% between 1996 and 2025, while the number living with their parents rose more than ten times as fast. Had the same proportion stayed at home as in 1996, around 2.8 million would live with their parents today. The actual figure is roughly a million higher, suggesting a real shift in when and how young adults can leave home.

Who is still at home, and until what age

The share living with their parents falls steadily with age, though later than many might expect. At age 20, 62% are still at home. More than half remain until around 24, when the figure drops to 46%. It then falls to one in four by age 27, around one in nine by 30, and just 7% by 34.

The pattern has also moved over time, with young adults staying at home later than they once did. At age 25, the share living with parents has risen from about a quarter in the late 1990s to roughly 36% today. At 27 it has gone from around one in six to one in four.

The gap between young men and young women

Young men are consistently more likely than young women to live with their parents. Nowadays, 35% of young men aged 20 to 34 live at home, compared with 22% of young women. That makes a young man more than one and a half times as likely to be living with his parents as a young woman of the same age.

This gap is nothing new. Men have been more likely than women to live at home throughout the past 30 years, and the difference between the two has stayed about the same size that whole time, with no real sign of widening or closing.

What has changed is that both groups have become much more likely to live with their parents. Since 1996 the share of young women at home has risen from about 15% to 22%, and the share of young men from about 27% to 35%. Because both went up by a similar amount, the gap between them has barely moved.

It would be reasonable to link this gap to the fact that women tend to form their own households slightly earlier, often by moving in with a partner. However, living arrangements are shaped by many things, including income, study and local housing costs.

Why are people living at home and not renting?

For many young people, staying at home means putting independence on hold in order to save for a deposit. Paying rent and building up a deposit at the same time is difficult, so a lot of them stay put until they have enough to buy.

One way to see the size of the barrier is to set the deposit against rent. In several areas, the same amount of money that covers a 10% deposit would pay for up to two years of renting independently, and for a larger deposit it would stretch further still.

The table below compares the cost of renting with the cost of buying across a range of towns and cities. For each area, it shows the average monthly rent, the average house price, and a 10% deposit expressed as the number of months of rent it would equal. It is a way of picturing the size of a deposit, not a savings plan, since nobody puts aside a whole month's rent on top of actually paying it.

In the larger cities where many young adults live and work, a 10% deposit is typically worth around 18 to 24 months of rent. Across all 316 local authorities in England and Wales the figure is higher, about 28 months, or just over two years, because many rural areas pair low rents with expensive houses.

For someone already paying rent, setting aside a sum that size takes years, which is why staying at home remains the more affordable route to a deposit for many young people.

The extreme end: London's priciest rental markets

At the far end of the scale sit central and inner London, home to the 10 most expensive areas to rent in the data. The table below shows their average monthly rent, the average house price, and the 10% deposit expressed as months of full rent.

In Kensington and Chelsea a 10% deposit of £133,001 is equivalent to almost 37 months of rent, close to three years. These boroughs are, of course, outliers rather than the norm, and at these prices, property is often bought by investors and higher earners rather than first-time buyers. The more telling picture is how high the barrier remains in ordinary towns and cities.

A view from Bird & Co

Dan Chard, partner at Bird & Co, said:

"The barrier for most first-time buyers is the deposit, not the monthly repayment. Our analysis shows that across the country, a 10% deposit is worth roughly two years of rent, and in the most expensive areas, a good deal more. That is a long time to save while also paying to live somewhere.

“Set against that, it is not surprising that the number of young adults living with their parents is the highest we have seen since records began. This is not only a London story. The same pressure shows up in towns and cities right across England and Wales."

What this means for young adults

Taken together, the figures describe a long-term shift rather than a blip. The number of young adults living with their parents has risen for most of the past three decades and now stands at a record high, young men are affected more than young women, and a deposit represents around two years of rent across most of the country. For many, staying in the family home has become a practical response to the cost of moving out and the size of the deposit needed to buy.

Thinking about buying your first home?

If you are working towards your first home, Bird & Co can support you with all your conveyancing needs. Call us on 0345 8777024 or request a quote. You can also use our first-time buyer deposit calculator to see how close you are to your deposit goal.

Methodology and data sources

This analysis uses the most recent ONS data on private rents and on young adults living with their parents, together with the latest HM Land Registry UK House Price Index.

For rents, we took the most recent 12 months of data, May 2025 to April 2026, and calculated an average. For house prices, we did the same using the most recent 12 months of the House Price Index, April 2025 to March 2026. For living arrangements, we used figures from 1996 to 2025, both for all young adults and for the breakdown between men and women.

The living arrangements figures are for the UK. The rent, house price and deposit analysis covers 316 local authorities in England and Wales.

For the deposit comparison, we took 10% of the average house price in each area and divided it by the average monthly rent in the same area. This shows the size of a deposit relative to rent and is not a savings timeline.

Any conclusions drawn from the data are those of the Bird & Co researchers.