The median price of an existing home in America is now $440,660, an all-time record, and the price has gone up for 36 consecutive months. Congress actually passed a bipartisan bill to fix this. Trump won't sign it because he wants something else first. So here we are.
The Number That Should Make You Sit Down
According to new data from the National Association of Realtors, the median existing home sold for $440,660 in June 2026. That is not a typo. That is the middle of the market. Half of all homes that sold last month cost more than that.
CBS News reports the regional breakdowns are somehow even worse. The median single-family home in the Northeast runs $564,800. In the West, $633,600. Even the comparatively affordable Midwest clocks in at $346,600. For reference, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. Do the math. Or don't, because it will ruin your day.
The number that really captures how broken this is comes from LendingTree: fewer than 4 in 10 non-homeowner households can afford a typical starter home priced around $200,000. Not the median home. A starter home. Half the median. Still out of reach for most renters. Real estate firm Redfin has found that a household needs to earn roughly $117,000 a year just to afford the average home. The median household income in this country is about $80,000.
Thirty-Six Months and Counting
Home prices have now risen for 36 straight months. Three full years. The only comparable period of sustained decline in recent memory was the 2008 housing crash, which, if you'll recall, was not exactly a win for regular people either.
This particular run started when mortgage rates shot up from their pandemic-era lows in 2022, which sounds counterintuitive until you remember that higher rates choke off new listings. Homeowners locked into 3% mortgages refuse to sell into a 7% market, supply craters, and prices keep climbing even as sales collapse. CBS News reports that sales of previously occupied homes spent most of last year stuck at a 30-year low, and through the first half of 2026, existing home sales are up a whopping 0.7% from the year before. Practically a rounding error.
"Housing affordability remains low under slowing wage growth and stronger home price growth," PNC Economics Research economist Ershang Liang wrote in a report. That sentence is doing a lot of diplomatic work. What it means in plain English is: prices are outrunning paychecks and have been for years.
Congress Actually Fixed It. Then Trump Got Weird.
Here is where the story takes a turn from depressing to infuriating. According to CBS News, Congress last month passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill designed to do exactly what housing economists have been screaming for: cut regulatory red tape on construction, discourage institutional investors from gobbling up single-family homes, and push zoning reforms to get more units built faster. It passed with bipartisan support, which in the current Congress is roughly as rare as a solar eclipse.
Trump was supposed to sign it. He had a ceremony scheduled. Then, in late June, he canceled it. Not because he opposes the bill. Not because he vetoed it. He's simply refusing to sign it until lawmakers pass a separate piece of legislation called the SAVE America Act, an elections bill. He is holding the housing fix hostage to an unrelated demand. While 36 months of record prices grind on.
NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun told the Associated Press, "Without a doubt, the affordability is a major challenge for people who want to become homeowners, which is the reason why we need more supply." He is correct. The supply fix is sitting on the president's desk. The president won't touch it.
What the Constitution Says, For What It's Worth
CBS News points out that under the Constitution, if a bill passes both chambers and is presented to the president, it becomes law automatically after 10 days (excluding Sundays) as long as Congress is in session. So there is technically a clock ticking on this, depending on procedural factors too dull to detail here but too consequential to ignore.
The fate of the bill, CBS News notes, "remains unclear." Which is a polite way of saying nobody knows what Trump does next, because nobody ever does. What is clear is that millions of Americans are in a holding pattern on the most consequential financial decision of their lives while Washington plays games with legislation that had enough votes to pass.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what is happening here. A bipartisan housing bill, the kind of thing that should be a slam dunk for any president who wants to say he did something about affordability, is collecting dust because Trump wants a different bill signed first. He is using the housing crisis as a bargaining chip. The people getting squeezed are the ones who can't afford a $200,000 starter home on a $60,000 salary, and they are not part of the negotiation at all.
The underlying problem, obviously, predates Trump by decades. Zoning laws that strangle construction, local governments that block density, institutional investors treating single-family homes like securities, the Fed's pandemic-era rate decisions, all of it has been building toward this wall for years. Democrats failed to fix it. Republicans mostly denied it was a problem. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, whatever its flaws, represents a genuine attempt at a structural solution, and it got bipartisan votes to prove it.
But here we are, June 2026, thirty-six consecutive months of record prices, and the bill that might actually chip away at this thing is parked in limbo because the president wants leverage on an elections bill. An elections bill. While people who work full-time jobs and do everything right can't afford a place to live. If you needed one image to capture how thoroughly the political system has failed ordinary Americans on housing, this is it: the fix, signed, passed, sitting on the desk, and a president who won't pick up the pen.
