Three years of house prices, state by state

Between July 2023 and July 2026, the typical American home gained 4.7% in value.

That sentence is true, and it describes almost nobody. In the same three years Connecticut gained 19.6% and the District of Columbia lost 7.5% — a spread of 27 percentage points between the top and the bottom. The national figure sits in the middle of that range the way the average of a hot oven and a cold one sits at room temperature.

So this is an article about the range rather than the average.

All the figures here come from the Zillow Home Value Index for all homes, which estimates what a typical home in an area is worth month to month. It is not an average of sale prices — a market where only expensive homes sell would push that up without any individual home gaining a dollar. Every number is the three years ending July 2026, and will stay that way: this article is dated, and the numbers in it are frozen to the window it describes.

The ends of the range

• Connecticut +19.6% $379,095 → $453,319
• New York +17.6% $448,547 → $527,312
• New Jersey +17.1% $498,795 → $584,072
• Illinois +15.6% $259,417 → $299,900
• Rhode Island +15.4% $446,541 → $515,289
• Wisconsin +14.4% $300,439 → $343,798
• New Hampshire +14.0% $457,079 → $521,177
• Ohio +13.5% $220,249 → $249,941
• Michigan +12.2% $240,189 → $269,576
• Kansas +11.9% $224,281 → $250,918
• 31 more states
• Vermont +2.4% $396,450 → $405,980
• Georgia +1.0% $330,907 → $334,119
• Oregon +0.5% $499,457 → $502,156
• Hawaii -0.1% $835,128 → $833,877
• Arizona -1.3% $426,748 → $421,381
• Louisiana -1.7% $220,763 → $217,092
• Colorado -2.2% $551,174 → $538,932
• Texas -3.9% $313,959 → $301,806
• Florida -5.1% $398,635 → $378,167
• District of Columbia -7.5% $623,870 → $577,041

Zillow Home Value Index, all homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted. A typical home's value, not a sale price average.

The top of the list is the Northeast corridor — Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire — with Illinois and Wisconsin sitting among them. The bottom is the Sun Belt and the mountain West: Florida, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and Hawaii, plus Louisiana, and the District of Columbia further down than any state.

Seven states are worth less than they were three years ago. That is not a crash — for scale, the country as a whole gained 15.9% in the single year 2021, so the largest fall here is half of one good year. But it is a real reversal of direction in places that had not seen one in a decade.

The first thing everyone gets wrong

The tidy explanation is that the pandemic boom towns are giving it back — that the places which ran up 40% and 50% between 2020 and 2022 are the ones falling now.

It is a good story and the data does not support it. Across the 51 states, the correlation between a state’s 2020–2023 gain and what it has done since is 0.00. Not weak. Zero.

You can see why by naming cases. Montana rose 53% in the boom and has risen another 6.8% since. New Hampshire rose 47% and added 14% on top. Florida rose 53% and has given back 5.1%. Meanwhile the District of Columbia, which gained 4% during the boom — the weakest in the country — has fallen further than anywhere. Whatever is sorting these states, it is not how hot they got.

What is actually sorting them

• Northeast +14.0% 9 states, +2.4% to +19.6%
• Midwest +10.9% 12 states, +6.2% to +15.6%
• West +4.7% 13 states, -2.2% to +9.8%
• South +4.2% 17 states, -7.5% to +10.5%

Zillow Home Value Index, all homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted. A typical home's value, not a sale price average.

Geography, mostly. The median Northeast state is up 14.0%; the median Southern state is up 4.2%. Eight of the nine Northeastern states beat the national figure — Vermont, at 2.4%, is the one that did not. Eleven of the seventeen Southern states failed to.

Price is a weaker second. States where homes cost less have gained more than states where they cost more, with a correlation of −0.28 between a state’s 2023 price level and its gain since — faint, but pointing the same way as the map, because the Northeast and Midwest lists are full of states whose prices were never high to begin with. Illinois at $259,000, Ohio at $220,000, West Virginia at $162,000: all three beat the country comfortably.

And then there is the one we did not expect to find.

The strongest relationship in the data is the one we cannot explain

• New Jersey +17.1% 2.23% of value in tax each year
• Illinois +15.6% 2.07% of value in tax each year
• Connecticut +19.6% 1.92% of value in tax each year
• New Hampshire +14.0% 1.77% of value in tax each year
• Vermont +2.4% 1.71% of value in tax each year
• New York +17.6% 1.60% of value in tax each year
• Texas -3.9% 1.58% of value in tax each year
• Wisconsin +14.4% 1.51% of value in tax each year
• Nebraska +9.1% 1.50% of value in tax each year
• Iowa +10.8% 1.43% of value in tax each year
• the ten lowest-rate states
• West Virginia +10.5% 0.54% of value in tax each year
• Idaho +4.8% 0.53% of value in tax each year
• Utah +4.7% 0.53% of value in tax each year
• Delaware +6.9% 0.53% of value in tax each year
• Arizona -1.3% 0.52% of value in tax each year
• South Carolina +3.6% 0.51% of value in tax each year
• Colorado -2.2% 0.49% of value in tax each year
• Nevada +5.0% 0.49% of value in tax each year
• Alabama +3.4% 0.38% of value in tax each year
• Hawaii -0.1% 0.27% of value in tax each year

Effective rate: American Community Survey 2019-2023, median real estate taxes over median home value. Change: Zillow ZHVI.

Of everything we tested, the best single predictor of how much a state’s houses gained over three years is how hard that state taxes property. The correlation is +0.62 — five times anything else on this page, and in the direction nobody would guess. The ten states with the highest effective property tax rates rose by a median of 14.2%. The ten with the lowest rose 4.2%.

We are not going to tell you that property taxes raise house prices. They do not, and the economics runs firmly the other way: a higher annual cost of ownership, all else equal, is capitalised into a lower price.

What is happening is that the rate is standing in for something else. The high-rate list is New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York — old states with old housing stock, little new construction, and local services funded from property rather than sales or severance taxes. The low-rate list is Hawaii, Alabama, Nevada, Colorado, South Carolina, Arizona — states that either build a lot or tax something else. The tax rate is a label on which America a state belongs to, and that label happens to be a cleaner one than anything in the price data itself.

It is worth naming for two reasons. It is a good demonstration of how a strong correlation can be real and still tell you nothing about cause. And it is a useful warning: if you have seen a chart claiming low-tax states are winning the housing market, the last three years of data say the opposite, and neither version is an argument about taxes.

The second thing everyone gets wrong

“The country was up 4.7%” and “the typical state was up 7.2%” are both true at the same time, and the gap between them is not a rounding error.

32 of 51 states beat the national figure. The national index is weighted by where the houses are, so the big, falling states — Florida, Texas, Arizona, California’s flat year — pull it down against the many smaller states that rose. If you live in one of those smaller states, the national number is not a benchmark you failed to meet. It is a different question being answered.

This matters beyond trivia. National figures are what mortgage pricing, lending appetite and news coverage run on, and for three years they have been describing a country that a majority of states do not live in.

Where the falls actually are

State	Below its peak	Peak month
District of Columbia	-13.0%	2022-06
Arizona	-9.5%	2022-07
Colorado	-7.3%	2022-07
Florida	-7.2%	2024-05
Texas	-6.0%	2022-08
Idaho	-5.4%	2022-06
Louisiana	-5.0%	2022-07
Nevada	-4.1%	2022-07
Oregon	-3.7%	2022-06
Georgia	-2.8%	2024-09

Swipe sideways for more columns.

Zillow Home Value Index, all homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted. A typical home's value, not a sale price average.

Seventeen states are below the best month they have ever recorded, and the dates sort them into two groups.

Eleven peaked in 2022 — most of them within weeks of each other in June, July and August. That is one event: the 30-year mortgage rate went from 3.45% in January 2022 to 6.90% in October, exactly doubling in nine months. You can read the date of it straight off the table.

Six peaked later, and they are a different story. Florida turned in May 2024, Vermont in June 2024, Georgia that September, California in January 2025, North Carolina in February, Kentucky in June. The rate shock was long over by then. Whatever is pulling these markets down started years after the thing that moved the first group, and Florida — now 7.2% below its peak — is the furthest into it.

What this means if you own one

Three things, in order of how much money they are worth.

Your state’s number is not your number. Within a state, counties diverge as much as states diverge within the country — we look at Ohio’s 88 counties in a companion piece and the spread there is 29 points, wider than the national one. A state average is a fact about a state, not about a house.

A rise in value is not a rise in your tax bill, and a fall is not a fall in it. In Ohio the two are barely connected in the short run, for reasons worth understanding properly; most states work differently but almost none of them work the way people assume. If your value fell and your bill rose, nothing has gone wrong with the arithmetic.

A falling market is the one time an appeal is easy. County valuations are set every few years and look backwards. In a market that has been falling since 2022, a value set at the peak and left alone is a number a board of revision will move — and the evidence is the sales on your own street, which are public.

You can check what your own bill should be in about a minute if you are in Ohio, with the two figures from your notice.