Since October 2019, and every one of them is a published series you can pull yourself. 60% of the house-price rise landed in the twenty-four months to February 2022 — spread evenly you would expect 30%. It really did happen all at once. Each figure updates when its series publishes: pay quarterly, the other three monthly.
Why all at once
First the money. Then the rates. Scroll, and here is each one, from the published series.
1 · The Flood
Since October 2019 the US money supply has grown 54% — $8.2 trillion of new dollars.
$6.6 trillion of it came by 2022: more than Germany’s entire economy. And it didn’t stop when the pandemic did. $1.6 trillion more since — more than all of Saudi Arabia’s.
More dollars, the same houses, the same eggs. Prices followed the money, about a year behind, which is why it arrived as a shock rather than a trend.
Money +54%. Houses +59%. Groceries and energy +57%. Rent on a new lease +40%.
Pay followed too — last, and least: +34% before tax.
Everything above the grey line is the part of the rise your raise did not cover.
Federal Reserve H.6, Case-Shiller, eleven BLS average prices, Zillow ZORI, BLS usual weekly earnings · M2SL, CSUSHPINSA, ZORI, LEU0252881500Q
2 · The Freeze
To bring prices back down, the Fed raised its rate faster than it had in forty years. The 30-year mortgage followed it to 7.79%.
It didn’t bring prices back. It moved the payment instead. On 1 October 2026 the rate was 7.28%.
Freddie Mac PMMS and the Federal Reserve · MORTGAGE30US, FEDFUNDS · every weekly survey; the Fed rate monthly
If you bought the typical home in October 2019, your payment is $1,203 a month, fixed.
To buy that same house again today: $2,850. So people who own stay put — and the houses a renter would buy don’t come up for sale.
Census/HUD median price October 2019, carried forward by Case-Shiller through July 2026; Freddie Mac PMMS · MSPUS, CSUSHPINSA, MORTGAGE30US
If you rent, the first question isn’t the payment. The first question is whether a lender will say yes at all.
In 2019 the lender wanted $51,557 a year for the typical home. One median full-time wage paid $48,672. Close.
Today the lender wants $122,131 — up 137%, the same as the payment, because the payment is what the lender tests. The wage pays $65,052.
Case-Shiller, Census/HUD, Freddie Mac PMMS, BLS usual weekly earnings · 20% down, 28% of gross, 30-year fixed; October 2019 at that month’s average rate, then every weekly survey to 1 October 2026
Since 2019
The income a lender needs went up 137%. You got a 34% raise.
To qualify for the typical home today, you would need another
on top of the raise you already got. Saving the deposit doesn’t change it — the lender asks for the income after the deposit is paid.
The renter’s page →That was the one-minute version
The first follows the new money: where it went, why the fastest rate rise in forty years froze the market it was meant to cool, and why the two effects multiply instead of adding.
The second prices the same eleven grocery and energy items twice, October 2019 and today, and asks why prices that rose have not come back down.
Each one has its own page, built the same way: every figure a published series, named with its code and the date it is true as of.