Number of young adults living with their parents climbed to 15% in 2016
Aside from their standing in the labor market, the cost of living independently and even student debts might affect the decision of young adults to live at home.
The share of less-educated millennials living with their parents’ home continues to rise due to unemployment and other leading factors, according to the Pew Research Center’s latest analysis of US census data.
Pew’s analysis also found that less-educated young adults are more likely to live with their parents than millennials who had completed at least a bachelor’s degree. The research center found that only 10% of these degree holders lived at home in 2016, compared with 7% of college-educated Gen Xers who lived at home in 2000. Contrastingly, 20% of young adults who had only a high school diploma lived in their parents’ home in 2016, increasing from 12% of Gen Xers in 2000.
Since the 1970s, wages and employment have continued to drop for less-educated young adults. College-educated workers and those with higher degrees, on the other hand, have experienced better outcomes finding jobs and were more likely to move out of their parents’ home.
“As of the first quarter of 2016 (when the living arrangements data were collected), only 5.1% of older young adults were unemployed, down from 10.1% in the first quarter of 2010,” Richard Fry, senior researcher at Pew wrote in an article. “Yet the share of 25- to 35-year-olds living at home rose during that span, increasing from 12% in 2010 to 15% in 2016.”
Based on the Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement collected in March, the living-arrangements data helped provide insight into the extent to which the young adults in the US are moving in and out of their living arrangements.
“Millennials – whether living with their parents or not – are moving significantly less often than earlier generations of young adults. Among 25- to 35-year-old Millennials who were living at home in 2016, 91% reported that they resided at the same address one year earlier. This does not preclude the possibility that the young adult moved out and ‘boomeranged’ back in the intervening year (perhaps multiple times); the data simply indicate that they lived with their parent or parents one year earlier as well,” Fry wrote.
