iStock photo

While affordability has improved in some areas of the United States, affording a single-family home in Greater Boston is not an easy task.

In order to afford a median-priced home in Boston, prospective homebuyers need to be making $204,465 a year, according to a new analysis by economists at the brokerage Redfin. That’s up 3 percent year over year.

But just 10.5 percent of home listings being affordable to households earning the median estimated income. The Greater Boston median annual household income sits at $110,697 according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The analysis combined both single-family and condominium units into a single category.

The median single-family home price in Greater Boston reached $850,000 in June of 2025, according to The Warren Group, the publisher of Banker & Tradesman. This is an increase of 2.1 percent from June of 2024.

Nationwide, the typical homebuyer needs to earn $112,131 per year to afford the median-priced home, which is nearly $25,000 more than the typical household makes.

Additionally, a household on the median income would need to spend 39 percent of its earnings on housing to buy a median-priced home, while only 34.6 percent of home listings are affordable for the typical U.S. household.