‘We should absolutely be concerned about noncollege-educated men today’: higher rents, living at home, falling out of the labor market

Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be living with their parents, and a new study says it’s particularly harmful for noncollege-educated men, who are less likely to hold jobs compared to their college-educated counterparts.

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As rents have surged across the country, more and more men are moving home, and once there, many stop working. In fact, one in six noncollege men (16%) now live with their parents, compared to 8% of college-educated men. A new working paper from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, follows six decades of U.S. Census data and draws a direct line between rising housing costs and the decline of male labor force participation.

“There are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for noncollege-educated men in the United States,” Penrose told Fortune. “Some of what we’re seeing is simply rational responses to a system that’s pricing them out.”

Since 1960, real rents in the United States have risen 150%. Over that same period, wages for men without college degrees have barely moved, thanks to automation, globalization, and the collapse of manufacturing. Penrose’s paper details that when rents rise, more Americans are forced back into the parental home. Men move home at nearly twice the rate of women. And noncollege-educated men who end up there, the data shows, are increasingly dropping out of the workforce.

For Scott Winship, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the issue is doubly concerning because noncollege-educated men may face more disadvantages today than what they would have experienced in the ’60s when Penrose first started looking.

“Today, there are many fewer noncollege men than there were a generation ago, and so we should absolutely be concerned about noncollege-educated men today,” Winship told Fortune. “They are a more disadvantaged group than they were in previous generations, just because the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree is up to 40% or so now, versus in the past, when it was much lower. And so that makes me worry.”

Higher rents are forcing people back home

A 10% increase in local rents raises the likelihood that a noncollege-educated man moves in with his parents by 1.1 percentage points. Penrose used geographic constraints like mountains, coastlines, and lakes as a research instrument in her paper and found that in areas where terrain limits construction and squeezes housing supply, costs are higher for reasons entirely unrelated to local wages or job prospects.

“In some areas, housing costs are higher not because people are earning more and driving up prices, but because there are limits to supply, because of geography: lakes, coastlines,” she said. “Housing is just more expensive there simply because it’s harder to build there.

“It would be surprising if cities with higher housing costs didn’t have more men living at home just because, almost by definition, they’re less affordable,” said Winship, who has studied men’s earnings over time at the AEI.

Simultaneously, the environment is almost enabling it, her paper says. Baby boomer parents, sitting on significant housing wealth, are better positioned than ever to absorb adult children. “Providing for your adult children when they’re priced out of the housing market is kind of a ‘normal good,’ as economists call it, something people spend more on as they get richer,” Penrose said. “Parents are earning more, and their sons are earning less.”

The data backs it up, according to Brandi Snowden, the National Association of Realtors’ director of member and consumer survey research. “Baby boomers continued to make up the largest share of recent homebuyers,” she told Fortune while referring to NAR’s 2026 Generation Trends report that showed a quarter of boomers purchased a multigenerational home recently. “This allowed them to care for aging parents or relatives and accommodate adult children that may be moving back into their house, or who have never left.”

The share of men between 25 and 45 living with their parents has nearly doubled since the 1960s, from 7% to 12% today. Women’s rate has also risen, but remains flat at 7%. And the reason the effect falls harder on men than women comes down largely to children. When Penrose isolates women without college degrees who don’t have children at home, their patterns begin to mirror men’s almost exactly.

“When I look at women without a college degree who do not have children, their labor force participation and their rates of living with parents start to look much more like these men,” she said. “The difference is young children.”

Noncollege men at home aren’t working

The most consequential finding in Penrose’s paper is what happens after men move in. Men living with their parents are 20 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force than those living independently. Tha