Exploring the Buyer-to-Resident Income Gap

The 2025 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) release marks a widening gap across most U.S. metros between what home buyers earn and what the residents of the neighborhoods they buy in earn.

Every year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes a record of who applied for a mortgage in the United States. Paired with income data from the American Community Survey, the 2025 HMDA release tells a two-part story. Nationally, the buyer-to-resident income ratio held at 1.42 in 2025, essentially flat with the 2024 peak of 1.44, but still well above the pre-pandemic baseline. Under that plateau, 250 metro areas hit new series-high ratios in 2025, more than in any prior year. The local stories that follow show a market that continues to reshape unevenly:

• Los Angeles is the extreme case. Buyers out-earn residents by $122,000, the only U.S. metro above a $120,000 gap.
• Miami posted the sharpest widening of any large metro, with the buyer-resident gap nearly doubling since 2018.
• New York has 857 lower-income tracts where the gap is both high and rising, the largest such count in the country.
• Austin is the counter-narrative: resident-income growth outpaced buyer-income growth, and the metro-wide ratio narrowed.
• Charlotte sits mid-range, with divergence concentrated inside the city rather than in the suburbs.
• Detroit's numbers barely moved. A legacy affordable metro where buyer and resident incomes remain closely aligned.

Inside Every Metro Area: A Neighborhood Divide

The sharpest finding in this updated dataset is a neighborhood-tier pattern that appears inside almost every large metro in the country. To better understand this trend, we sort census tracts within the 50 largest metro areas into five equal-sized bins by resident income. The gap between what home buyers earn and what residents earn is dramatically larger in the bottom-income tiers than at the top.

In other words, home purchases in wealthy neighborhoods are made by people who earn about what their neighbors earn. Home purchases in lower-income neighborhoods are systematically being made by significantly higher-earning incomers. Across the fifty largest metros, more than five thousand lower-income tracts show a rising pattern of high-earning buyers moving in. New York leads (857 tracts), followed by Los Angeles (617) and Miami (274).

Based on the national trend alone, an observer might conclude that the affordability problem is slightly easing. The neighborhood-tier view shows that where the gap is, matters: buyers in the lowest-income neighborhoods earn 91 percent more than their neighbors, more than double the 42 percent national premium, and the effect concentrates in the neighborhoods with the least capacity to absorb displacement pressure.

Metro Area Case Studies:

New York-Newark-Jersey City

The typical New York-metro home buyer earned $181,000 in 2025 versus $102,000 for the typical resident, an absolute dollar gap of about $79,000, up from $46,000 in 2018. Buyer incomes grew 50 percent over the period while resident incomes grew 36 percent. The metro widened again from 2024 to 2025 (+0.05), the largest single-year move among the top-20 metros.

The metro contains roughly 800 lower-income tracts where the gap is both large (1.5 or higher) and rising, the largest such count in the country. The strongest widening and the strongest narrowing neighborhoods in the region are in Brooklyn. The high-gap tracts concentrate in the Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Bushwick corridor; sharp-decline tracts sit further out where the buyer pool more closely matches long-standing residents.

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim

Los Angeles is the extreme case. In 2025 the median home-purchase applicant in the metro earned $220,000 against $98,000 for the median resident, an absolute gap of $122,000. That gap grew from $70,000 in 2018, a 74 percent increase in seven years. LA is the only large U.S. metro where buyers out-earn residents by more than $120,000. Origination volume dropped 5.6 percent in 2025 as the ratio held at 2.23.

The high-gap tracts follow the classic gentrification map: the Expo Line corridor through Mid-City, Silver Lake and Echo Park, Highland Park and northeast LA, and swaths of South LA between the 10 and the 110.

Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach

Miami posted the sharpest widening of any large metro over the seven-year window. Buyer incomes rose from $89,000 to $149,000 (+67 percent, the largest buyer-income gain among the six metros) and resident incomes from $54,000 to $79,000 (+45 percent). The dollar gap doubled, from $35,000 to $70,000. The 2024 to 2025 move was small (1.88 to 1.90) but the level remains at the top of the metro distribution.

Before the pandemic, buyer-resident divergence in Miami sat in a handful of well-defined clusters (Miami Beach, Brickell, downtown); today it registers almost everywhere in the tri-county area: Allapattah, Little Havana, Little Haiti, and Overtown, all historically working-class neighborhoods now absorbing an in-migrating high-income buyer pool.

Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos

Austin is the counter-narrative. The metro's ratio narrowed from 1.49 in 2018 to 1.42 in 2025, one of the few large metros to move in that direction, and it has been narrowing for four consecutive years. Resident incomes grew 41 percent (from $73,000 to $103,000) while buyer incomes grew only 34 percent (from $109,000 to $146,000): Austin is the only one of the six metros where resident income growth outpaced buyer income growth.

But the metro is pulling apart internally. Sharp-rise tracts concentrate in East Austin and along the MLK and Airport Boulevard corridors in Travis County; sharp-decline tracts appear in outer Williamson and Hays. Origination volume was down about 8 percent in 2025, the largest drop among the top-20 metros.

Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia

Charlotte sits mid-range and is useful as a peer point of comparison. Buyer incomes grew from $83,000 to $124,000 (+49 percent); resident incomes from $61,000 to $85,000 (+40 percent). The dollar gap grew from about $22,000 to $39,000. The metro's ratio was essentially flat through 2021 and rose only in the last four years, tracking a broader Southeast pattern of late-cycle widening as pandemic-era migration into the region persisted.

Buyer-resident divergence is a Charlotte-proper phenomenon, not a suburban one. The tracts involved sit primarily on the eastern and northern arcs of the city (Plaza Midwood, NoDa, and neighborhoods along Beatties Ford Road and North Tryon fit the profile).

Detroit-Warren-Dearborn

Detroit is a legacy affordable metro whose ratio barely moved. Buyer incomes rose from $75,000 to $100,000 (+33 percent, still the smallest gain among the six metros); resident incomes from $58,500 to $79,000 (+34 percent). The dollar gap grew from about $16,500 to $21,000. During the pandemic, buyer income growth briefly lagged resident income growth: the 2021 ratio dipped to 1.15, the tightest buyer-resident alignment of any of the six metros in any year.

What appears to be happening: buyer pools are broadening into historically depressed Detroit-proper neighborhoods, pulling the local ratio down. Downtown, Midtown, Corktown, and adjacent tracts show up in the sharp-rise pattern (gentrifying redevelopment), while the historically high-income Oakland County suburbs sit in the metro's low-gap cluster core. Median purchase prices grew seven percent to $305,000, the fastest of the six original metros.

The Bigger Picture

The 2025 HMDA release reveals an unevenly distributed gap between home buyers and existing residents across U.S. metros. This gap hits hardest in neighborhoods with the least capacity to absorb displacement pressure, and its implications cut in different directions: for existing owners in lower-income neighborhoods where the gap is widening, rising buyer incomes translate into rising home values, a genuine wealth gain on paper. But that same dynamic makes it harder for those owners to trade up or relocate within their own market, because the price of the next house is set by a buyer pool with meaningfully higher earnings than they have.

The pattern signals something about who is actually transacting: in the metros with the widest gaps, home purchases are increasingly the province of high-income households, leaving first-time buyers and median-income households to compete on unfavorable terms or step out of the market entirely. Los Angeles, Miami, and Austin illustrate the range: the highest ratio in the country, the fastest widening in the country, and one of the few metros where the gap is narrowing. Every U.S. metro sits somewhere on the map.

Curious where your community stands? Explore HousingWeaver's HMDA data to see the buyer-to-resident income gap in your county, metro, or tract →.