California Homeowners Have $627K in Equity—but It Buys More if They Leave

The typical California homeowner with a mortgage now has $626,900 in home equity, according to new data. That’s roughly twice the national average of $310,500—and enough to purchase the median-priced home outright in 48 states.

There’s just one catch: That wealth goes further almost anywhere but California.

Today, the median home there is listed at roughly $750,000, according to data from Realtor.com®. Meanwhile, the California Association of Realtors puts the median price of an existing single-family home at $904,640

That gap captures a much larger divide in the housing market. 

Nationally, mortgaged homeowners held $17.9 trillion in net equity in the first quarter of 2026, according to the latest home equity report from Cotality—roughly five times as much as 15 years ago. But the opportunity created by that wealth looks vastly different depending on where homeowners live.

“This large store of housing wealth continues to support household net worth, but it also keeps many homeowners handcuffed and contributes to a slower-moving housing market,” explains Selma Hepp, Cotality’s chief economist.

California puts an unusual twist on those golden handcuffs. Owners may be reluctant to give up the homes and mortgages that helped them build so much wealth. However, for those willing to sell and leave, that equity can become an escape hatch from high housing costs altogether.

How homeowners accumulated so much buying power

The Golden State doesn’t even top Cotality’s equity rankings. Hawaii does, with the average mortgaged homeowner holding about $688,000—roughly $61,100 more than second-place California—while Massachusetts ($479,600), Washington ($441,000), and New York ($433,000) round out the top five.

But California is notable because of it’s massive scale. Roughly 7.6 million households live in owner-occupied homes there, compared with about 310,000 in Hawaii, according to U.S. Census Bureau records.

What links the top five is not one extraordinary burst of appreciation, but years of housing scarcity layered onto already high home values.

“Two decades of price appreciation stacked on top of each other, concentrated in states that can’t easily build their way out of scarcity,” says Realtor.com senior economist Hannah Jones.

“Hawaii and California face literal geographic constraints (islands, coastlines, mountains), while Massachusetts and New York layer on some of the most restrictive zoning and permitting in the country, and Washington has both, plus a tech-driven income boom in Seattle that pulled prices up around it,” Jones says.

While the exact reasons differ state to state, the result was the same.

“In all five, decades of underbuilding relative to job and population growth meant that even modest annual appreciation compounded into enormous dollar gains, simply because the base price was already so high.”

California then entered the COVID-19 pandemic with some of the country’s highest home values just as another historic run-up began.

“Layered on top of that structural story is the 2020–22 run-up, when rock-bottom rates and pandemic-driven demand shifts collided with historically low inventory,” Jones says.

From early 2020 to spring 2022, California home prices jumped roughly 37%. The correction that followed barely dented those gains: Prices fell nearly 4% over the next three quarters, then resumed climbing. By early 2026, prices reached a new record, roughly 46% above where they had started six years earlier.

The catch: You have to leave to unlock the advantage

For all that accumulated wealth, $626,900 doesn’t buy nearly as much in the market where California homeowners earned it.

A California homebuyer moving in-state would still need to take out a mortgage at today’s punishing rates. Meanwhile, in Florida, their equity could cover the median-priced home outright and leave about $271,900. In Texas, roughly $319,400 would remain. In Ohio, there’d be more than $412,000.

Even so, taking advantage of that escape hatch still comes at a cost.

“Equity isn’t cash, and realizing that equity means selling, absorbing transaction costs and potential capital gains tax, and actually uprooting your life to move somewhere cheaper,” Jones says.

Increasingly, though, Californians are doing exactly that. The state lost nearly 230,000 residents to other states in 2025, after losing more than 240,000 through domestic migration the year before, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

New research provides an unusually clear picture of what those movers gain. The California Policy Lab followed Californians who moved out of state between 2016 and 2025 and found that they landed in neighborhoods where total monthly housing costs were about $672 lower than in the communities they left. For homeowners, the median home in the destination neighborhood was nearly $398,000 cheaper—a 48% difference.

Those movers did give up some local earning power: Incomes in their destination neighborhoods averaged about 8% less. But home values fell by 48%, making the housing-price difference six times as large as the income difference.

Seven years after leaving, those former Californians were also 48% more likely to own a home than similar residents who remained in the state.

“The price tag has gone up on the California dream, and many families are leaving the state for more affordable places,” California Policy Lab executive director Evan White said when the findings were released. “The difference these moves make is stark.”

Cheaper states have been trying to capitalize on that gap for years

Ohio, at least, appears to have been listening to the frustrations coming out of California and other high-cost markets.

At the height of the housing boom, JobsOhio ran billboards in expensive markets pitching the state as a lower-cost alternative. One Los Angeles billboard read: “Your buildings are taller, our taxes are smaller.”

However catchy the slogans were, those who left didn’t necessarily head to the states making the loudest pitch. Proximity, it seems, still matters. On a per-capita basis, Nevada receives the largest net flow of Californians, followed by Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona, according to the California Policy Lab. Texas ranks 11th and Florida 20th. 

Regardless, wherever they end up, Californians are more often than not arrive from a very different housing-wealth position. Cotality’s rankings show how wide that gap has become: In the states with the least amount of equity, mortgaged homeowners average just $114,700 in equity in Louisiana, $123,900 in Oklahoma, and $124,300 in Iowa.

So the housing divide exposed by California runs in both directions. A homeowner can leave because the market where they built their wealth has become difficult to afford—and arrive somewhere that makes that same wealth far more powerful.