If it seems like buying a home has never felt harder, new data shows why.
Payments on a median-priced home consumed 30.3 percent of the typical American worker’s annual wages in the first quarter of 2026, underscoring an affordability burden that stretched across the country regardless of local market conditions, according to a new report from Attom.
Attom’s first-quarter Housing Risk Report ranked 580 counties across four measures — foreclosure rates, seriously underwater mortgage share, affordability relative to local wages and unemployment rates — and found that the riskiest markets were concentrated in Florida and California, where affordability strain was compounded by elevated unemployment and foreclosure activity.
Of the 50 riskiest counties, 12 were in Florida, nine in California and five each in Illinois and New Jersey. The least affordable county in the analysis was Kings County, New York, where expenses for a median-priced home consumed 108.6 percent of the typical resident’s wages.
“While home prices have eased slightly from last summer’s record highs, affordability remains a challenge in much of the country,” Attom CEO Rob Barber said in a statement. “The greatest risk remains in counties where unemployment rates are above 5 percent, and homes are being foreclosed at greater rates.”
Nationally, one in every 1,211 homes was in foreclosure, and 3.2 percent of homes were seriously underwater, meaning outstanding loan balances exceeded the estimated market value by at least 25 percent. Louisiana parishes posted the highest underwater rates, with Ouachita Parish at 17.4 percent.
On the low-risk end, nine of the 50 safest counties were in Tennessee. Those markets were not notably more affordable than others but posted some of the lowest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the analysis, a distinction that may matter to agents working with relocation clients or investors evaluating market stability.
