Is a new rental half a house?

Just under half. The typical new rental apartment finished in the United States in 2025 had 1,000 square feet of floor space. The typical new single-family house had 2,142, a little more than twice as much. Apartments built to be sold sat in between, at 1,170 square feet.

See the numbers

Type of new home	Median floor area
Single-family house	2,142 sq ft
Apartment for sale	1,170 sq ft
Apartment for rent	1,000 sq ft

What it shows

Each outline is drawn to the same scale and shares one corner, so the space between them is the difference in floor area. The detailed plan is the median new rental. The dashed outlines around it are the median new apartment built for sale and, larger still, the median new single-family house.

These are medians. Half of the 1,005,000 single-family houses completed in 2025 were larger than 2,142 square feet and half were smaller. The same goes for the 484,000 apartments and other multifamily units completed that year. New houses sold, rather than completed, in 2025 had a slightly larger median of 2,194 square feet.

What it leaves out

Floor area is not the whole story of a home. The figures say nothing about price, location, garden or garage, and nothing about how many people live in the space. A small apartment in a city centre and a large house far from work are different bargains, and the chart does not say which is better.

The room layout inside the plan is illustrative: only the outer size comes from the data. The shapes are drawn as simple rectangles of the same proportions so that the areas can be compared fairly.

New homes are also a small slice of all homes. Most people live in older housing, which this survey does not cover.

Part of the gap is simply what gets built. The Census Bureau found that 42% of the new multifamily units completed in 2025 had one bedroom, and only 10% had three bedrooms or more. A one-bedroom apartment and a family house are answers to different questions, and the median of each reflects that.

Sources and method

Figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's Characteristics of New Housing highlights for 2025, based on its Survey of Construction. The Census Bureau notes that the estimates come from sample surveys and are subject to sampling variability. Single-family figures are for homes completed in 2025; the apartment figures are for multifamily units completed in 2025, split by whether they were built for rent or for sale.

And the answer is → Just under: 1,000 square feet against 2,142, or 47% of a new house.