SALT LAKE CITY – Buying a home in Salt Lake County continues to grow more unaffordable, a new report shows.
A report from the Salt Lake Board of Realtors looks at what it takes for buyers to afford a median-priced home.
The median price of a single-family home in Salt Lake County was $645,000 in the second quarter of 2026—a record high.
To afford a median-priced single-family home in Salt Lake County, the Board of Realtors found that a household needs an annual income of $186,827.
However, households in Salt Lake County only have a median income of $97,494, according to 2024 data from the US Census Bureau.
That means an average county resident looking to buy a home faces a $90,000 income gap.
The report highlights what’s already common knowledge about the housing crisis in Utah’s most populous county.
The board said unaffordability is a combination of “limited housing supply, record-high home prices, and elevated interest rates,” creating a “perfect storm.”
Expanding housing affordability
As prices in Salt Lake County soar, the county government is hoping to team up with the state and city governments to expand housing options for residents. The county itself only oversees funding from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Housing and Community Development Director Tanya Birks told Utah Junction that any party that wants to use the funding has to undergo a strict application process.
Birks said although the application process is rigid, residents and communities can share input. All applications undergo review by the Salt Lake County Council.
The most recent round of applications required a focus on affordable housing, as the county said it was “prioritizing resources to activities that increase or sustain affordable housing inventory, increase a household’s housing stability, or contribute to economic mobility.”
The next round of applications for HUD funding won’t open until 2029, however. In the meantime, the county is looking for more funding aside from what it gets from HUD to meet rising demand.
“The county, much like other local governments, is short on funding. We don’t have enough to serve the need,” Birks said.
She also said that because the county is solely in charge of allocating funding for housing, it’s looking to strengthen relationships with the state and city governments to work together to meet housing needs.
“The goal is to try to work as a team… instead of working as individual entities. The hope is that if we can pool all our resources together, whether that be money, whether that be land, whether that be staffing—whatever we can do to try to close the gap between the resources available and what’s actually needed.”
State leaders have made big commitments to expanding housing affordability, but progress remains slow.
In 2023, Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) announced a goal of adding 35,000 homes to the state by December 2028. However, as of April 2026, only 7,412 of those starter homes have hit the market. And only 1,030 of those were in Salt Lake County.
Research from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found that the state will need 280,000 new housing units by 2035 to keep up with an increasing population. Of those, researchers estimate that 61,500 should target new owners and renters.
One housing advocacy group — the Wasatch Advocates for Livable Communities (WALC)—says the answer is not to expand outward.
“It’s generally called infill development, meaning that you’re filling in empty land within the existing city or replacing homes that burn down… you’re replacing them with new development in the city,” WALC Founding Executive Director Turner Bitton told Utah Junction.
This type of development allows smaller homes to be built on smaller lots. Those homes include small single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes.
WALC is currently advocating for a zoning change in Salt Lake City that would allow more infill development.
Bitton said infill isn’t as popular because big, institutional developers can’t make as much money off of those developments.
Bigger developments are cheaper to build and can be built all at once, Bitton said. The developers then only need to hire one set of workers who can maintain the area easily, without any travel involved.
“Whereas when you’re building these little fourplexes or a starter home in Salt Lake City, you’re going to have to fit them into existing neighborhoods. And so you have to hire a gardener that would then drive around to 10 different properties and maintain them,” Bitton said. “That just does not work with the financial model for these very big companies.”
More to be done
In addition to increasing infill development, Bitton said increasing access to affordable housing and housing stability will also help with the affordability issues in the state.
The state and local governments need to provide more incentives for builders to create affordable housing units.
“The private market is not going to build that on its own. It needs that support and subsidy from the government… We advocate for a couple of things: direct financial investment in affordable housing, but also putting up government land to help facilitate the construction of affordable housing.”
And on the matter of housing stability, Bitton said Utah renters need more protections.
“People can be vulnerable or their housing can be unstable. And that contributes to the broader affordability issue, because essentially you end up with people who are competing against people with more resources for the limited supply of housing that exists.”
