Where young adults are most likely to live with parents

In some California cities, it’s common for parents to have roommates: their adult children.

Three California metro areas host the highest shares of 25- to 34-year-olds living in a parent’s home relative to other U.S. metros, according to a new analysis by Pew Research Center, a non-partisan research organization.

In the Vallejo and Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura metros, 33% of young adults were living with their parents in 2023, Pew found. (Those metros are in the San Francisco Bay Area and outside Los Angeles, respectively.)

In El Centro, east of San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border, 32% of young adults live at home, according to Pew.

Those shares are significantly higher than the 18% U.S. average. In some metros, the share is as low as 3%.

Young adults can save about $13,000 a year by living with their parents, according to a 2019 Federal Reserve analysis. About half of those savings — $6,400 — is from housing and utility costs, it found.

Nationally, 50% of parents with a child older than 18 provide them with some financial support, averaging $1,474 a month, according to Savings.com.

These are the 10 metro areas with the highest shares of 25- to 34-year-olds living with their parents in 2023, according to Pew:

Vallejo, Calif. — 33%Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, Calif. — 33%El Centro, Calif. — 32%Brownsville-Harlingen, Texas — 31%Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif. — 30%Merced, Calif. — 30%McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas — 29%Naples-Marco Island, Florida — 29%Racine-Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin — 29%Port St. Lucie, Florida — 29%

These are the 10 metro areas with the lowest shares of 25- to 34-year-olds living with their parents in 2023, according to Pew:

Odessa, Texas — 3%Lincoln, Nebraska — 3%Ithaca, New York — 3%Bloomington, Indiana — 3%Bozeman, Montana — 4%Cheyenne, Wyoming — 4%Wausau, Wisconsin — 5%Midland, Texas — 5%Manhattan, Kansas — 6%Bismarck, North Dakota — 7%

Demographics — and their interplay with personal finances — appear to be the primary driver of high shares of young adults living with their parents in certain metros, said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew and co-author of the analysis.

There are fewer white young adults and more Hispanic, Black and Asian young adults in the top 10 metro areas with the largest proportions of 25- to 34-year-olds living at home, Fry said. (The one exception is Racine, Wisconsin.)

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“Areas where there are more minority young adults tend to have more young adults living at home,” Fry said. “That’s not always the case, but it is a pattern.”

Black and Hispanic young adults are less likely to have a college degree and tend to have lower earnings as a result, Fry said.

“Being able to live independently may be more of an issue for them,” he said.

The typical Black or Hispanic worker, age 25 to 34, earned about $46,000 a year in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The typical white young adult worker earned $58,000.

Part of the reason may also be cultural, Fry said. There are likely other factors at play like cost of living, though the correlation isn’t as strong, he said.

Many of the metros with low shares of young adults living at home are college towns, Fry said.

For example, Ithaca, New York, hosts Cornell University, and Bloomington, Indiana, has Indiana University, Fry said. Many young adults here are likely university graduates who are well-educated and opt to stay there after they graduate instead of moving home, he said.

Nationally, the share of young adults living at home climbed starting in the early 2000s, peaking at 20% in 2017, according to Pew. (It declined to about 18% in 2023.)

Unemployment spiked during the Great Recession and it took many years for the labor market to heal, Fry said. Meanwhile, young adults today are more likely than older generations to be saddled with student debt.