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New-construction bedrooms have gotten noticeably tighter in many cities. Eachnight's latest report highlights a few cities moving the opposite way
Jimmy Woo / Unsplash
Home buyers walking into a newly built house often expect more space than what they actually get. Builders have kept bedroom counts close to four per home even as total square footage has pulled back from the peak reached during the previous decade, meaning each bedroom now competes for a smaller share of the floor plan than it did a generation ago. That squeeze shows up most in the primary and secondary bedrooms, where a bed, a dresser and enough floor space to walk around used to fit with room to spare. Shoppers accustomed to judging a home by its total square footage rarely think to ask how that space actually gets divided among individual rooms, and the answer increasingly favors closets, common areas and storage over the private rooms where people spend their nights.
National data on new single-family construction bears out that squeeze. Average bedroom space in homes built during the 2020s fell to an estimated 189 square feet, down from a peak of 206 square feet during the previous decade, even as the typical new home continued to carry close to four bedrooms. Builders have leaned into smaller footprints to hold down prices amid high land and material costs, often trimming secondary bedrooms and shared living space rather than removing a bedroom from the floor plan. Buyers have responded by prioritizing flexible rooms, like a home office or a workout space, over generously sized bedrooms, giving builders less incentive to protect that square footage when drawing up a new floor plan. Local zoning, land costs and buyer demographics all shape how much of a home's footprint ends up in the bedrooms, and those forces differ enormously by market.
