Stats › Long run returns › Housing vs stocks
Housing against stocks
Ask most people whether their house or the stock market has done better over their lifetime and you'll get a confident answer either way. The honest answer is that the usual comparison measures two different things, and neither number means quite what it gets used for.
This page has the US house price record since 1987, in nominal terms and after inflation, alongside what's happening in the market right now. It also has the two reasons the straight comparison misleads: a price index isn't a return, and almost nobody buys a house with cash. I put it together because this argument comes up constantly and it's nearly always fought with the wrong numbers on both sides. There's a section on how the Case-Shiller index is built, which is a genuinely good piece of methodology with one important limitation for this particular comparison, and a section on what the market is doing right now, which is quietly more interesting than the long run figures.
Case-Shiller data comes via Advisor Perspectives, with one equity figure from Damodaran's dataset for the comparison. Both are linked underneath with the periods they cover. Note that the April 2026 readings are the most recent released rather than today's, which is normal for housing data and worth remembering when someone quotes it as current.
The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national home price index has risen 417% since 1987 in nominal terms and 73% after inflation. Over roughly the same period the S&P 500 compounded far faster. In April 2026 house prices were up 0.8% year on year in nominal terms and down 2.4% in real terms, an eleventh consecutive month of real declines. The comparison is also structurally unfair in both directions, and the reasons are more interesting than the headline.
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