Home prices are still rising — but where you live matters more than ever.

Key takeaways

• Nationwide, house prices are still going up, but much more slowly than earlier in the decade.
• Long‑term growth differs sharply across regions, leaving very different price levels today.
• Recently, several lower‑priced regions — such as the Midwest and parts of the South — have seen solid gains, even as higher‑priced areas cool.

If you’ve been following the housing news, the message can feel mixed. Price growth has clearly slowed, yet affordability still feels tight. In some places, prices barely seem to be moving. In others, they’re still climbing.

Data the Federal Housing Finance Agency released Tuesday can help explain why. The report shows that the housing market no longer has a single national story to tell. Instead, it’s shaped by regional differences — between places where prices surged for decades and those now seeing more momentum.

At the national level, FHFA data shows that house prices are still rising, but only modestly. Year‑over‑year growth is now in the low single digits, far below the rapid gains of 2021 and 2022. Month‑to‑month changes have also been small.

Put simply, prices are still inching higher, but the pace is slow enough that many buyers barely notice it from one month to the next.

This tells us something important. Higher mortgage rates and affordability limits are restraining buyers, and sellers have less pricing power. Prices are rising mainly because there still aren’t enough homes for sale.

Even slow price growth can feel very different depending on where you start.

Since the early 1990s, some regions — such as the Pacific coast states (California, Oregon and Washington) and New England — saw prices rise much faster than others, while much of the Midwest and the West South Central United States (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas) experienced more moderate increases. As a result, today’s price levels vary widely across the country. Even if home prices are rising slowly now, they can still feel much more expensive in some places because those places had big run-ups in the past.

Think of this like riding an escalator. If someone has been on it for several seconds and someone new steps on, slowing the escalator doesn’t put them on the same floor. In other words, slower price growth doesn’t make expensive markets affordable again; it just means they’re getting expensive more slowly, while cheaper areas are starting from a much lower base.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Recent price growth doesn’t line up neatly with those long‑term patterns of stronger appreciation in the West and Northeast and slower growth in the middle of the country.

The FHFA dataset shows that some regions with modest long‑term growth — such as those middle states and the South Atlantic ones (Florida, Georgia, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) — are now seeing firmer recent gains, often around 4% to 5% over the past year.

Meanwhile, regions that led the country for decades are cooling off. In higher‑cost areas, price growth has slowed sharply, with some months close to flat, as buyers react more strongly to higher mortgage rates.

 

For buyers, this helps explain why the market feels stuck in some places but still competitive in others. In lower‑priced regions, incomes can still support buying, even with higher rates. In higher‑priced regions, many potential buyers remain sidelined.

For homeowners, the picture is mixed. Those in long‑booming regions still have substantial equity but little new price growth. Owners in slower‑growth regions may have less equity overall but more momentum now.

The information from the FHFA shows a housing market defined less by a single national trend and more by contrast. National price growth is modest, but underneath that average are regions gaining traction and others cooling off.

The key question ahead is whether today’s stronger‑gaining regions continue to close the gap — or whether slower growth spreads more broadly. Either way, where you live still plays a big role in how the housing market feels.