There are many factors to take into account when buying a home: location, cost and — especially for people hoping to grow their families — size.
In the United States, the median square footage of newly built homes was on the decline between 2015 and 2020. But even as square footage decreased in the short term, there has been a decades-long increase in the areas of single family homes, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The median single family home built in 2020 had a floor area of 2,261 square feet, a 4.2% increase from 2010 and a 9.9% increase from 2000. The size of the median single family home reached a peak of 2,467 square feet in 2015 before declining to the 2020 median, a change that experts attributed to the economy’s slow recovery following the financial crisis.
“Many buyers, even financially solid buyers, were shut out of the new home market,” between 2009 and 2015, Rose Quint, National Association of Home Builders’ assistant vice president for survey research, told Business Insider in 2021.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the dip in the economy actually led to an increase in both the size and the quality of new homes being built during this period.
“When you look at the characteristics overall of the new homes that were started between ‘09 and ‘15, you’ll see that homes got bigger and bigger, and they were more loaded with amenities year after year steadily between ’09 and 2015,” Quint told Business Insider.
In spite of these decade-by-decade increases, however, it is not the United States that leads the world in large, single-family homes.
The Perfect Rug, a website that sells custom made rugs, recently conducted an analysis on the nations with the largest home size. The company’s analysis pulled data from World Population Review, Statista, Eurostat and official census records to determine the countries with the largest single family homes.
“The ranking is based on average square footage but the study also takes into consideration average household size per country as well as data for percentage of households by living members, overcrowding rate and percentage of homeowners,” the Perfect Rug report explained.
Continue reading to see which countries have the largest single-family homes.
