The first-time homebuyer market is greying. The National Association of Realtors reported in November that the median first-time buyer in 2025 was 40 years old — up from earlier in the decade to an all-time high. Meanwhile, the share of all homebuyers who are first-timers fell to one in five, an all-time low, according to the Realtor group’s 2026 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report issued in April 2026.All of this has consequences for Americans’ ability to put down residential roots and build long-term wealth.Kim Tate Wistreich is 38 and a new homeowner. He lives on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood of older homes in Portland, Oregon. The house is 120 years old, with original moldings and huge bay windows.“We’ve been here just over three weeks now,” he said. “We moved in without anything, just bought a dining room table, a couple of pack-and-plays for the babies,” — 17-month-old twins.For more than a decade, Tate Wistreich and his wife lived and worked in Thailand, renting and saving. Back in the U.S. with a young family, they started house-hunting while moving from rental to rental, facing high mortgage rates and losing houses they wanted to other bidders.“The market was pretty tough,” said Tate Wistreich. To get the house they now own, “We actually bid above the market value, which felt like a pretty bold move at the time, maybe not the right move.”But it was a move they at least could make with savings in the bank and financial help from their parents. Israel Hill, their broker at John. L. Scott Real Estate in Portland, sees a lot of similar first-time buyers: “Definitely an older crowd. The cost of homes has gone up. Someone needs to have a substantial down payment and be pretty stable in their economics to be able to afford a property.”Data from real estate site Zillow confirms the trend, said senior economist Orphe Divounguy: Zillow’s typical prospective buyer is 39 years old. “They have to have a much higher income than they used to, to grab onto the first rung of the homeownership ladder,” Divounguy said.Some housing analysts have disputed the National Association of Realtors’ finding that the typical first-time buyer is as old as 40, though an NAR spokesperson told Marketplace in an email that the group stands by its figure. Redfin has done its own data analysis and concludes that the average age of first-time homeownership has risen, said Chen Zhao, head of economic research. “The bulk of the evidence is that the median age of a first-time homebuyer is somewhere in the mid-30s, and it seems like it’s risen quite a bit for the last 20 years as people have repeatedly delayed homebuying,” said Zhao. “That’s partly for affordability reasons, partly because people just do everything later in life — they get married later, they have kids later, so they buy a house later as well.”Edward Pinto, co-director of the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute, has concluded based on his analysis of homebuying data that there has not been a significant rise in the median age of first-time buyers in the past decade, but there has been significant improvement in their finances.“What’s actually going on is houses have gotten more expensive,” said Pinto. “The age hasn’t changed particularly. People age 25, 30, 35 — they’re still getting homes. They just have higher income than the people that used to get homes when prices were lower.”As to whether it’s a good idea to wait until age 35 or 40 to buy a first home, Northwestern Mutual wealth management advisor Ashley Russo said, citing recent survey results, that first priorities should actually be saving for an emergency fund and for retirement. Russo added that building equity in a home is not a good strategy for generating liquid savings to live on in retirement.“I like to remind people who are going for houses and might be torturing themselves: owning a home is not the only way to build wealth,” Russo said. Orphe Divounguy at Zillow said delaying first-time homebuying can have advantages. “If you are starting later, investing in the stock market, then you’re probably in good shape,” he said.There are benefits to owning at any age, said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. Mortgage interest can be tax-deductible. And while rents tend to go up, with a fixed-rate mortgage, he said a homeowner locks in their housing costs and can build up significant wealth over time.That is, if home prices keep going up, and if a homeowner stays in their home long enough to build up equity.