The number of young people who moved back home reached a height of 49.5% in 2020 during the onset of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. That figure has since fallen to 48% in 2021, but that rate is expected to remain the same in 2022 despite many people definitely going back to work.
However, the trend of living at home is benefitting luxury goods companies as young people enjoy greater levels of disposable income that would normally have gone on rent.
“We think the structural change in demographics might have been overlooked,” Morgan Stanley’s Edouard Aubin said in the company's report. “One of the key demographic trends in the US (and the broader Western market) has been the rising number of young adults living with their parents, driven by financial concerns (i.e. rental costs) as well as other sociological factors (e.g. higher penetration of higher education and increasingly delayed age for marriage).
Meanwhile, around 25 percent of adults aged 29-41 also live with their parents, with 55 percent of them moving in within the past year. Their primary motivation for doing so was to save money on rent. Despite four-in-ten millennials living at home revealing their parents charge them rent, around half of respondents said they were charged less than $500 per month.
The rise in people living at home is a relatively new phenomenon, with people previously moving out at a much earlier age. According to Pew Research, the number of adult Americans living in multigenerational households has quadrupled since 1971.
