Inside: What is the average age to move out of parents’ house in 2023?
Having children is a learning experience that never ends. As soon as you think you got the hang of it, they get older, and a whole new can of worms opens up that you need to learn to navigate.
It can be tricky to know the lines that should be crossed and shouldn’t be crossed. Do you be their friend or their parent? When should they get more responsibilities?
The questions don’t stop once they reach adulthood; in fact, they might even get trickier.
So today, I am going to go over one of my favorite questions: What is the average age to move out of your parent’s house in 2023? This is a great question that has an answer that is more complicated than just a number. So I am going to walk you through all of the different aspects that will help you come to the conclusion on your own.
Average Age to Move Out of Your Parents House in 2023
The short answer to this is between 24 and 27.
According to imoving.com, “While there are a lot of factors involved, the average age when people move out of their parent’s home is somewhere between 24 and 27. This makes logical sense – it’s after many people have completed college and around the time when most people get married and/or are in a long-term relationship.”
So there is your number, but I think the factors to consider are just as important, if not even MORE important, than the number itself. The truth is that this generation is facing a different set of challenges than previous generations.
I want to go over those challenges because they are part of the reason that the age of moving out is so high. It is easy to judge when you don’t know the full story, so let’s learn about it.
Factor One: College
It’s no secret that college is expensive. On top of the price tag, it is also very time-consuming, which makes it hard for full time college students to get a job, or at least a full-time one. It’s known that a college workload will be about 36 to 48 hours of education-related activities. This is the same if not MORE hours than having a full-time job.
So it is understandable that a student would not be able to juggle the over 80 hours of work per week that would be needed in order to afford their own place. Because of this, many college students will stay at home part-time while they attend college.
This is especially true for college students who stay in the dorms at college. More often than not, they are still technically living at their parent’s home, but only during the summer and winter break. So they aren’t even there 75% of the year, but they do still use it as their ‘home base,’ so to speak.
Factor Two: Rent Prices
Rent prices right now are CRAZY. I live in a small town, and the prices here are even unreasonable, and it gets worse in other areas of the U.S. I saw a house listing on Facebook the other day that was a one-bedroom, one-bath, 700-square foot duplex that was being rented for 2,300 per month. It wasn’t even that nice.
The sad part is that this is the norm in a lot of places right now, especially near bigger cities or colleges. This makes it especially hard for young people who are just getting out of their parent’s homes to find a place to stay that they can afford.
Most landlords expect you to make three times the amount of the rent in order to live there, and when you are so young, it can be hard to make that kind of income, especially when you are also going to college.
Factor Three: Minimum Wage
Now we are getting into the nitty gritty of this topic. The cost of living is exponentially high right now, while the minimum wage is still very low. It is common knowledge that you cannot survive on a minimum wage salary alone. Although many states have higher minimum wages, the federal one is still at 7.25 an hour. Yikes.
So even if your child went out and got a slightly higher paying job that paid, say, $18 an hour, they would still not be making enough to be able to live comfortably without getting another job.
This plays a large role in the fact that the average age to move out of parent’s house in 2023 is so high. Many parents are happy to house their children for longer if it means they will be safe, happy, and healthy.
Factor Four: Extended adolescence or Emerging Adulthood
While the world is changing and growing, so are we. There is a newer phenomenon that is surfacing that is referred to as extended adolescence. According to this article written by Margie Meacham,
“It seems that adolescence—that period before we become adults—is growing longer. In The Age of Opportunity, Laurence Steinberg makes the case that human beings are entering and staying in adolescence longer than ever before. This special phase in human development is starting earlier and lasting longer.”
Have you ever heard of the phrase, “30 is the new 20.”? Well, that just might be the case. In that article, Margie goes on to say that adolescence can last from 10 years old and well into the late 20s. Young people these days are more inclined to take time to figure themselves out, go to school, and work towards a career before they settle down.
This is much different than it has been in the decades before, when it was expected for teens to move out at 18, get married in their early 20s, and start a family. These days, your kids are more likely to stay at home for longer because they don’t have these pressures to go out and jumpstart their lives in the same way that they have in the past.
Many parents are also using different kinds are parenting techniques that allow them to be more involved with their children’s lives, so their staying home for longer is not seen as a burden or a bad thing.
So there you have it, the average age to move out of your parents house in 2023. I hope that you found this article enlightening. I told you, the answer is much more complicated than you may think. This generation is dealing with a whole different array of challenges that make it harder to move out at a young age.
But with this being said, they aren’t fully at home all the time anyways, and keeping their room open to them can help them eliminate stressors, which in turn gives them the opportunity to work harder at school.
If you are about to have an 18-year-old, I think it would be super helpful to them and to you if you took a look at this article about the rights of an 18-year-old. They are more insightful than you may think.
I am Natalie, the eldest sister of two teens. I hope to bring not only a fresh outer perspective but an internal one as well when writing here.