Single women are purchasing homes at a much larger rate than single men are, according to new findings shared by PBS News Hour. The publication reports that 20 million single ladies own homes in the U.S., a figure that is nearly 3 million more than the number of single men who own homes.
And this demographic includes a wide variety of women, including women who have never married, are divorced, or are separated.
To find out why this is happening, PBS had its economics correspondent look into the reason why so many single women are looking to purchase a home of their own, and why single men seem to be lagging.
He discovered that there are a few reasons why this happens, as well as the surprising fallout many of these women face.
Single Women Want a Space of Their Own
PBS News Hour reports that the number of homebuyers who are single women has almost doubled since 1981, adding up to 20 million in 2025. Some of these women wait until they’ve finished college to purchase, while others simply want to buy a home so that they can fully personalize their space.
“We love our home,” Maureen Mahood told the publication. “We want to decorate it. We want to do the things. And men in some instances don’t want to be that domestic. They want to live in an apartment, where everything’s taken care of. Maybe they want to invest their money, instead of buying a home.”
These women are also usually looking for more affordability. “My mortgage, my property tax, and my insurance are like $400 less a month than I was paying just for rent,” Jennifer Nelson said, adding that it’s also helped her personal life as well. “I think it’s helped me with like my confidence. And I call myself Jennifer 2.0, my life the second time around and what I’m doing moving forward.”
Some Single Women Face Backlash After Becoming a Homeowner
While it may seem like owning your own home would make you a hot commodity on the dating scene, some women say that it has actually been a hindrance. “Sometimes, guys, especially here in the South, feel like having a house or owning a house is what a man does for his presumed wife,” Tiffany Tate said.
Stefanie O’Connell says some men find financially independent women threatening. “There is a growing body of research that shows that when women outpace men on traditional markers of masculinity, particularly financial markers, wealth, status, income, for example, they face backlash,” O’Connell, the author of The Ambition Penalty said.
She believes that some of the things that men identify with being masculine are tied up in homeownership, like wealth, status, and independence, which can leave some men feeling like something has been taken from them when they are dating a woman who owns a home.
If this seems like a relatively new issue on the dating scene, it could be because women only gained protection from discrimination from financial institutions in 1974 with the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), when it became illegal for lenders to turn away unmarried women or force them to have a male co-signer on their loan, according to BankRate.
This is likely what led to the bump that happened after 1981, ushering in the start of a new reign of homeowners. Of course, single women still face all kinds of barriers—according to the Pew Research Center, women still earned an average of 85 percent of what men earned in 2024 (the most recent year the data was published), making it harder for more single women to afford a mortgage—but it seems like many women are finding ways to make it work despite the challenges they face.