Older Adults Seeking Roommates Triple as Young People Stay Home Longer

For the better part of a decade, Darla Desautel has moved around the country renting rooms with strangers rather than signing leases alone. At 74, the Minnesota native doesn't see that as a concession. "Oh, I think it's wonderful," she said. "Maybe more the way people used to live." But for millions of older Americans behind her, the math is forcing a similar calculus with far less enthusiasm.

The share of adults 65 and over looking to rent with a roommate has tripled over the past decade, according to roommate-listing site SpareRoom. The 65-and-up cohort was also the fastest-growing age group on the platform between 2023 and 2024, with listings from that bracket rising 48 percent in a single year. Adults in the 55-to-64 range were close behind, up 40 percent over the same period.

"They're not the biggest group of roommates, but they're by far the fastest growing," said Matt Hutchinson, SpareRoom's communications director. The force driving them there, he said, is straightforward: studio and one-bedroom apartments that were once within reach have become unaffordable. "Maybe 10 years ago, they'd have looked at a one-bed or a studio and thought, well, I'll rent that," Hutchinson said, "and they're looking at prices and going, there's no way I can afford that."

That dynamic shows up in the broader data. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found that one in three older adult households is now cost-burdened, and 58 percent of older renters specifically face housing cost burdens as of 2024. Jennifer Molinsky, who researches aging and housing at the center, said the problem has spread well beyond low-income households. "Older adults are more likely to be housing-cost burdened than working-age adults, and that gets more severe with age," she said. "It's climbed up the income scale, so more and more middle-income people are struggling with housing costs than ever before."

Nearly a million people over 65 now live with unrelated housemates, a figure that has doubled since 2006 as the older population has grown, according to Harvard's estimates. The pressure compounds when a health crisis or the death of a spouse hits. Caezilia Loibl, who chairs the Consumer Sciences Program at Ohio State University and has studied the financial toll of chronic illness and spousal loss among older adults, described outcomes that show up clearly in her data: rising debt burdens, falling credit scores, bankruptcies, and foreclosures. "The shock is enormous," she said.

The shift is reshaping the roommate market from both directions. With young adults staying in their parents' homes longer, unable to afford to move out, SpareRoom finds that the overall pool of roommate-seekers is aging rapidly. One in four roommates in the United States is now 45 or older, a share that has more than doubled over the past decade.

For those who do find workable arrangements, the savings are real: SpareRoom estimated that seniors renting out a room in one of the country's 20 largest metros can pull in $900 to $1,600 a month. But federal housing assistance hasn't kept pace with the need. One man profiled in the trend, who volunteers his photography skills and shares a Costco membership with his housemate in exchange for having utilities and cable covered, looked into a housing subsidy and found his income placed him just over the eligibility threshold. "It's that give-and-take thing," he said. "It's trying to help each other out as much as possible." With waitlists for assisted housing stretching years in most markets and the supply of purpose-built senior housing far below projected demand, that improvised mutual aid may be the most scalable solution available for now.