Vacant Home Statistics 2026: How Many Vacant Homes Are in the US, and How Many Are Actually Sellable

Vacant homes get quoted in a sloppy way. Someone sees "15 million empty houses" and pictures 15 million motivated sellers waiting for a phone call. That is not what the data says, and if you build a list off that assumption you will burn dial time on second homes and lake cabins. So let me lay out the real numbers, where they come from, and which slice actually feeds a seller pipeline.

Every figure on this page traces back to one source: the Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey. FRED republishes the counts, USAFacts repackages the annual view, but it is all the same survey underneath. That is good for you, because it means the numbers line up instead of fighting each other.

1. How Many Vacant Homes Exist in 2026

As of Q1 2026, the US had about 15.3 million vacant housing units. The precise figure is 15,305 thousand units, from FRED series EVACANTUSQ176N, released April 28, 2026 and sourced from the Census Housing Vacancy Survey. That is the number to cite when someone asks how many vacant homes there are right now.

It holds up against the annual view. For full-year 2024, USAFacts (citing the Census Bureau, updated January 15, 2026) reported roughly 15.1 million vacant homes, about 10.3% of housing inventory. The 15.1 million from 2024 and the 15.3 million from Q1 2026 are not two competing findings. They are the same measure a year and a bit apart, and they are consistent. Use 2026 as your current number and 2024 only when you want annual context.

Here is the part most people skip. The 15.3 million count and the 10.3% vacancy rate are the exact same data point expressed two ways. FRED gives you the count, the Census gives you the percentage. Do not present them as two independent stats, because they are one stat wearing two outfits.

The funnel that actually matters

The 15.3 million is the top of the funnel. The largest single category inside it is "seasonal, recreational, or occasional use," which is mostly second homes and vacation properties. Those owners are not motivated sellers in any normal sense. So you have to walk the number down.

Year-round vacant units, the category the Census tracks separately from seasonal stock, made up 8.0% of total housing units in Q1 2026. That is the slice that includes homes standing empty for estate settlement, repairs, or owner reasons, which is exactly the profile you want. And as of Q3 2025, more than half of US year-round vacant residences were actively held off the market, not listed for sale or rent anywhere. That held-off-market pool is the cleanest match for off-market motivated-seller sourcing, and it is the heart of the vacant property lead type.

2. Vacancy Rates (Overall, Rental, Homeowner)

In Q1 2026, 89.7% of US housing units were occupied and 10.3% were vacant, per the Census Housing Vacancy and Homeownership release. That 10.3% is your all-units figure, the one to use when you say "X percent of homes are vacant."

The Census also publishes two narrower rates, and this is where people misquote the data constantly. National vacancy rates in Q1 2026 were 7.3% for rental housing and 1.1% for homeowner (for-sale) housing.

The gap between those two rates tells a real story. Rentals are roughly six times likelier to be vacant than for-sale homes. Rental units turn over fast, sit empty between tenants, and refill. For-sale owner inventory empties out far less often, which means a genuinely vacant single-family owner property is the scarcer, higher-intent slice. That is useful framing for why off-market sourcing beats waiting on the MLS: the vacant owner homes you actually want are not sitting on a listing site.

One more market signal from the same Q1 2026 release. The median asking rent for vacant for-rent units rose $115 to $1,579, while the median asking sales price for vacant for-sale units fell $24,700 to $339,100. Softening asking prices on the for-sale side is the kind of pressure that nudges some owners toward taking a direct offer instead of riding the market.

3. Vacant Homes by State and Type

Vacancy is heavily concentrated by geography and by type, and both matter when you pick a market. Let me start with type, because it explains the geography.

The largest category of vacant housing nationally is seasonal, recreational, or occasional use. In over one-fifth of US counties, these units are at least 50% of the vacant stock (2020 Census). That single fact reshapes how you read state-level numbers, because the states that look most vacant are usually the most seasonal.

By state in 2024, Maine had the highest vacancy rate at about one in five homes vacant, around 20%, with Vermont and Alaska also near the top. Among the 75 largest metros in 2024, Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL had the highest vacancy rate at 34.1%, while New Haven-Milford, CT had the lowest at 4.0%. That spread, 34.1% down to 4.0%, is the whole point: vacancy is not evenly spread, so neither is your lead density.

4. Principal-City vs Suburb Splits

The Census Housing Vacancy Survey breaks vacancy down by location inside metros, principal cities versus the suburbs around them, and the pattern is not what most people assume. The instinct is "cities have the empty buildings." The data is messier than that.

The clearest version of the split shows up at the metro level. The Cape Coral-Fort Myers vs New Haven contrast (34.1% vs 4.0%) is really a story about Sun Belt vacation geography against dense Northeast suburbs. The high-vacancy metros tend to be Sun Belt and coastal, where a large share of housing is built to sit empty part of the year. The low-vacancy metros tend to be older, denser Northeast and Midwest areas where almost every unit is somebody's primary residence.

For sourcing, the takeaway is practical. In a high-vacancy Sun Belt metro, you have to filter hard, because raw vacancy is dominated by seasonal units that are not for sale. In a tight Northeast or Midwest metro, vacancy is lower but a larger share of what is vacant is year-round and owner-occupied stock that went empty for a real reason. The headline rate tells you almost nothing on its own. The type breakdown inside the metro is what tells you whether there are sellers there.

This is also why an absentee owner filter matters more than a raw vacancy filter. An owner who lives in a different state than the property is a stronger motivated-seller signal than a unit that happens to be empty in a vacation town, because the absentee owner is carrying a property they are not using and often not local enough to manage.

5. Why Vacancy Signals a Motivated Seller

Strip away the headline number and here is why investors care about vacancy at all. A home nobody lives in is a home that costs money and produces nothing. Taxes, insurance, maintenance, sometimes a mortgage, all running with no rent and no owner using it. That carrying cost is the pressure that makes an owner pick up the phone.

The held-off-market pool is the sharpest version of this. These are year-round vacant units not listed anywhere, often empty because of estate settlement after a death in the family, a repair the owner cannot afford or coordinate, an inherited property nobody wants to deal with, or a move that left the old place behind. Those owners are frequently more open to a direct offer than someone living in the house, because the house is a problem they have been avoiding, not a home they love.

That is the whole reason vacant and absentee records sit at the top of most investors' lead-type rankings. You are not cold-calling random homeowners. You are calling people who already have a reason to want out, they just have not done anything about it yet.

Notice what these have in common. None of them are on the MLS. A held-off-market vacant property is invisible to anyone refreshing a listing site, which is exactly why outbound sourcing finds deals that on-market buyers never see.

6. Pulling Vacant and Absentee Lists

Knowing 8.0% of housing is year-round vacant does not put a phone number in front of your caller. Turning the macro data into a callable list is a separate job, and it runs in three steps: pull, stack, and skip trace.

Pull the records. List platforms let you filter for vacancy status and absentee-owner status directly. You are looking for the overlap: properties flagged vacant where the owner's mailing address differs from the property address. That intersection is the densest motivated-seller pool, and our list sourcing work starts here, pulling and filtering to a buybox instead of dumping a county-wide file on a caller.

Stack the signals. Vacancy alone is a decent filter. Vacancy plus tax delinquency, or vacancy plus a recent inheritance indicator, is a much better one. Layering distress signals is how you shrink a broad vacant list into a list where a real share of the owners have a reason to sell this year, not someday.

Skip trace to phone numbers. A vacant-property record gives you an address and an owner name. It does not give you a working cell number, and since the owner does not live at the property, you cannot just call the house. You have to skip trace to find the absentee owner's actual contact info. Skip trace hit rates and the resulting contact rates are where a lot of vacant campaigns quietly fail, because a list nobody can actually reach is not a list.

7. From Vacancy Data to Outreach

Here is how the whole thing connects. The Census says roughly 15.3 million units are vacant. Walk that down to year-round vacant (8.0% of all housing) and then to the held-off-market pool (over half of year-round vacant), and you have quantified the absentee and vacant lead pool in a market. That is a real, defensible TAM for an outbound campaign, not a vanity stat.

But a list does not close deals. Outreach does. Once you have a vacant and absentee list pulled and skip traced, somebody has to work it: dial it consistently, qualify the owners who answer, and follow up with the ones who are interested but not ready. That is the volume game, and it is where cold calling turns the data into pipeline. A list of 2,000 vacant owners is potential. Two thousand dials a week against that list, with a real follow-up cadence, is what makes it produce.

That is the bridge for any investor reading this. The vacancy data tells you the lead pool exists and roughly how big it is in your market. Building the list, skip tracing it, and running the outreach month after month is the part that actually generates motivated seller leads, and it is the part most operators do not have the systems or the seat time to sustain.

Sources

Every figure on this page is rooted in the Census Bureau's Housing Vacancy Survey, cross-confirmed across the Census release, FRED series, and USAFacts.

• U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership (Q1 2026 release): Q1 2026 occupancy and vacancy split (89.7% / 10.3%), rental vacancy 7.3%, homeowner vacancy 1.1%, year-round vacant 8.0% of units, median asking rent $1,579 and median asking sales price $339,100, released April 28, 2026.
• FRED (St. Louis Fed), Vacant Housing Units in the United States (EVACANTUSQ176N): total US vacant housing units Q1 2026 = 15,305 thousand (about 15.3 million), Census HVS-sourced.
• USAFacts, How many vacant homes are there in the US?: about 15.1 million vacant homes in 2024 (~10.3%), over half of year-round vacant held off market (Q3 2025), seasonal/recreational the largest category, Maine highest state (~1 in 5), Cape Coral-Fort Myers 34.1% highest metro, New Haven-Milford 4.0% lowest.
• FRED, Year-Round Vacant Housing Units in the United States (EYRVACUSQ176N): the year-round vacant series, the standing-empty pool separate from seasonal vacancy.
• FRED, Vacant Housing Units Held Off the Market in the United States (EOFFMARUSQ176N): held-off-market vacant units not listed for sale or rent, the category most aligned with off-market motivated-seller opportunities.
• FRED, Vacant Housing Units for Sale in the United States (ESALEUSQ176N): the vacant for-sale inventory series used to derive the 1.1% homeowner vacancy rate.