Give me the % rate of young people renting homes in 2024 compared to 1980

1. What the user is really asking and why the data is messy

The question seeks a simple percentage comparison—“what percent of young people were renting in 2024 compared to 1980”—but the sources provided do not include a single, directly comparable series that reports renter share by a consistent “young” age band (e.g., 25–34) for both years; instead the available evidence is a mosaic of proxies (headship rates, living-at-home rates, first-time buyer shares, and rental-market indicators), meaning any numeric claim would require unbacked interpolation beyond the supplied material ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

2. Headship fell: fewer young adults were householders in 2020–24 than in 1980

The U.S. Treasury’s demographic analysis shows that in 1980 roughly half (50 percent) of Americans aged 25–34 were heads of their own household, while by 2020 that share had dropped to about 40 percent—a decline of roughly 10 percentage points in household formation for that cohort ^[1], which implies fewer young people were living independently in 2020 than in 1980 and therefore a larger share were either living with parents or remaining in non-householder situations.

3. More young adults are living with parents today than in 1980, cutting into independent household and ownership rates

Apartment List records that in 2022 about 17 percent of young adults lived with their parents—more than double the low period that ran through 1960–1980, when the rate was about 8 percent—showing a large rise in at-home living that helps explain why fewer young adults were householders and why renting patterns among those who do form households are not directly comparable across eras ^[2].

4. Rental demand and first-time buying patterns point toward higher rental reliance among younger cohorts in 2024

Contemporary reporting and market analysis indicate Gen Z and younger millennials are disproportionately shaping rental demand, and first-time buyers made up a relatively small share of purchases in 2024—Redfin and related coverage put first-time buyers at about 24 percent of purchases in 2024—supporting the inference that a greater share of younger adults are renting or delaying purchase compared with past decades ^{[3] [4]}.

5. Why available rental-market numbers don’t produce a clean “1980 vs 2024 percent renting” figure

Rental-market series in the dataset focus on aggregate rent levels, vacancy rates, and construction (Apartment List, iPropertyManagement, DoorLoop) rather than providing an age-specific renter-occupancy percentage stretching continuously from 1980 to 2024; the Treasury and Census-derived headship figures are useful but do not on their own separate owners from renters among householders, so they cannot deliver the requested exact percent change without additional age-by-tenure tables not included here ^{[5] [1] [6]}.

6. Bottom line assessment from the supplied evidence

From the supplied sources it is not possible to report an exact numeric percent of young people renting in 1980 and in 2024 and therefore not possible to give a precise percent-point change; nevertheless the supplied evidence—10 percentage-point decline in headship for 25–34-year-olds (1980 to 2020), a rise in young adults living with parents from about 8 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2022, and contemporary analyses showing Gen Z driving rental demand and weak first-time buying—collectively indicate that younger Americans in 2024 were more likely to be renters or otherwise not household heads than in 1980 ^{[1] [2] [3] [6]}.