• 59% U.S. homeowners own their home with a mortgage or a loan, 58% mortgaged homeowners have a 30-year mortgage, and 95% pay their mortgage once a month
• 74% of homeowners who own their home free and clear paid off their mortgage early

Who are Mortgaged Homeowners?

A Zillow survey found that almost three in five (59%) U.S. homeowners own their home with a mortgage or a loan. [1]

Almost all mortgage homeowners (95%) report an interest rate below 7.00% and three quarters (75%) of mortgage holders report a mortgage rate below 5.00%.  For context, between 2002 and 2022, monthly mortgage rate averages were below 7.00%. Overwhelmingly, the largest share (58%) have a 30-year mortgage.

Mortgage Payment Behaviors

Almost all (95%) mortgage homeowners pay their mortgage once a month. Only 5% make biweekly – every two weeks – payments. Two thirds (61%) of homeowners with mortgages have an automatically recurring payment set up to help them make these payments.

In the past year, about three in five (57%) mortgage holders made no additional mortgage payments beyond their monthly or biweekly payments. 20% made one to four additional payments, 13% made between five and eleven payments, and 10% made twelve or more additional payments.

Owning a home free and clear

The other two in five (41%) homeowners own their homes free and clear.  Of these homeowners, about four in five (84%) purchased that home and one in ten (10%) inherited their home. 

One sixth (17%) of homeowners who own their homes free and clear never had a mortgage on any current or past home. Over half (58%) previously had a mortgage on their current home, but paid it off.

Of the homeowners that paid it off, most (74%) paid off their mortgage early, before the end of their mortgage term duration. A quarter (25%) paid it off exactly in their mortgage term.

Methodology 

These analyses use data from the ZG Population Science Mortgages and Moving Survey. Homeowners and renters 18 years of age and older who did not move within the last 12 months were eligible for participation. The survey was fielded September 2023 and included 3,188 adults: 2,177 homeowners and 1,011 renters.  For the purpose of this study, “homeowners” refers to household decision makers who live in a home they own. “Renters” refers to household decision makers who live in a home they rent.

To achieve national representativeness, quotas for age, education, sex, region, race, and marital status limited oversampling of any given demographic group. In addition to using quotas for respondent sampling, ZG Population Science weighted the sample to the overall U.S. population using the U.S. Census Bureau 2022 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) using these same characteristics.

[1]  This is fairly consistent with the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, which found that 61% of households own their home with a mortgage or loan.