How Much Have Home Prices Gone Up? Reading the 1, 5, 10 and 20-Year Figures

The short answer

Nationally, the FHFA House Price Index is up +3.0% over the last year, +41.3% over five, +93.3% over ten and +93.5% over twenty (all windows ending 2026 Q2). The ten-year and twenty-year totals are close because the twenty-year window starts in 2006 Q2, near the top of the last boom, and the decade that followed gave most of it back before the rise that followed. Every state, metro, county and ZIP page on this site shows the same four windows for its own area.

Reading a window

Each figure is the index at the end of the window divided by the index at the start, minus one. “Ten years” means exactly forty quarters back from the latest published quarter for a state or metro, and ten annual values back for a county or ZIP, where the series is annual. The start and end periods are printed beside every figure because they are not the same for every level: the quarterly series currently end at 2026 Q2, the annual ones at 2025.

The per-year figure is a compound annual rate, the steady yearly rise that would produce the same total. Nationally, +93.3% over ten years is +6.8% a year; +93.5% over twenty is only +3.4% a year. Two windows with the same total change and different lengths are very different stories, and the per-year column is what makes them comparable.

The national picture

FHFA all-transactions index, United States, not seasonally adjusted. A $300,000 home that tracked the national index for the last ten years would be worth about $579,995 today.

States are not the nation

Over the same ten-year window the spread across states is wide. The largest rises are Idaho (+152.5%), Maine (+122.8%) and Utah (+120.9%); the smallest are District of Columbia (+32.7%), Louisiana (+42.1%) and North Dakota (+53.0%). Texas, the example this site uses throughout, is +87.1% over ten years and +154.8% over twenty. The state index lists all fifty-one, and each state page lists its metros and counties.

Why one house gets four different answers

Run one purchase through the ZIP, county, metro and state indexes and you get four figures, sometimes far apart. Three things drive it. The areas are genuinely different: a neighborhood, a county and a state do not move together. The series end at different dates: annual ZIP and county figures stop at 2025, quarterly state and metro figures reach 2026 Q2. And the county and ZIP indexes are FHFA’s “developmental” series, built from fewer sales and revised as data arrives. The home value since purchase calculator uses the smallest level with data and prints all four side by side, so the spread is visible rather than hidden behind one confident number.

What these figures do not say

• Nothing about your house. The index tracks an area’s average; renovations, condition and lot are invisible to it.
• Nothing about cash, jumbo, FHA or VA sales, which are outside the conforming-mortgage sample the index is built from (FHFA HPI FAQ).
• Nothing about inflation. These are nominal changes. Part of any twenty-year rise is the dollar shrinking.
• Nothing about the future. A window is history, not a forecast.

None of it is an appraisal.

Sources

• FHFA House Price Index datasets, master file, traditional all-transactions quarterly series.
• FHFA HPI frequently asked questions.

This guide is for informational purposes only. It is not an appraisal, and not financial, tax, lending or real-estate advice. Every estimate on this site tracks an area’s average, never a particular house. Confirm anything that matters with a licensed appraiser or your lender.

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Against the FHFA House Price Index master file through 2026 Q2.