Back in 2017, we wrote about the Houzz & Home report and asked some pointed questions. Things like: does knowing what the average homeowner spends on renovation actually help you market your business? And why are only 5% to 8% of Houzz’s massive audience hiring a designer, when 27% are hiring a general contractor?
Seven years later, Houzz has published its 2025 U.S. Houzz & Home Study, covering 2024 activity. We’ve had a chance to compare the two reports side by side, and the trends are worth some serious thought — both about the market and about how design professionals navigate it.
The Money Question, Revisited
In 2017, the median renovation spend on Houzz was $15,000. Sounds modest, until you remember the 90th percentile was spending $85,000 or more. The lesson then — and now — is that averages and medians can obscure more than they reveal.
By 2024, the median renovation spend had risen to $20,000. But here’s the twist: that number actually declined from $24,000 in 2023. So after years of steady upward momentum — the median climbed from $13,000 in 2019 all the way to $24,000 in 2023 — spend pulled back last year. That’s a 17% drop in a single year, even though Houzz frames it carefully as spend “softening.”
At the high end, it’s a different story. The 90th percentile of spend also declined, from $150,000 in 2023 to $140,000 in 2024 — which actually matches the 2022 level. So the very top of the market gave back its gains too.
The nuance is in the middle: major remodels of large kitchens (200+ square feet) held steady at a $55,000 median for the third consecutive year, while small kitchen major remodels actually rose 9% to $35,000. The high end of the market is bifurcating — full gut renovations are holding up, while overall spending is pulling back.
Here’s the number that doesn’t get enough attention: in 2025, the median planned renovation spend is $15,000 — the same as it was in 2017. That’s not adjusted for inflation.
Homeowners are planning to spend, in real terms, considerably less than they did eight years ago.
What does this mean for you? The same thing we said in 2017:
the number that matters most is the average spend within your own customer file.
National medians give you context. Your own data gives you strategy.
Kitchens and Bathrooms: The Numbers Require a Second Look
In 2017, kitchens were the undisputed No. 1 renovation project. The 2025 report announces — with some fanfare — that bathrooms have caught up.
An equal share of homeowners, 24% each, upgraded a bathroom as upgraded a kitchen.
That’s real.
But worth noting: the report counts guest bathroom renovations in that 24% figure for bathrooms, not just primary bathrooms. Primary bathrooms came in at 22%. Kitchen renovations (24%) still lead primary bathroom renovations by two percentage points.
The headline “bathrooms caught up to kitchens” is accurate in aggregate, but the underlying data is more nuanced than the framing suggests.
Spend tells a clearer story of divergence. The median spend on kitchen remodels dropped 8% in 2024, to $22,000. The median spend on primary bathroom remodels dropped 13%, to $13,000. Both are down year over year. But major remodels — projects that replace all the cabinets and appliances in a kitchen, or all the vanity, countertops and toilet in a bathroom — held steady or rose.
The market is splitting: homeowners doing significant work are spending consistently, while the broad middle is pulling back.
For high-end bathroom projects specifically, the 90th percentile of spend on large primary bathroom remodels jumped from $60,000 in 2023 to $70,000 in 2024. That’s a notable move upward even as the median fell. The luxury end of the bathroom market is expanding.
Renovation Activity Is Still Widespread — But Read the Trend Lines
In 2017, 58% of Houzz homeowners renovated their homes.
In 2024, that number was 54%. But 52% plan to renovate in 2025 — which is a further step down. And the share planning to decorate dropped from 46% in 2024 plans to 44% in 2025 plans, while the share doing repairs is ticking up to 35%.
Read that combination carefully.
Fewer homeowners are planning to renovate or decorate. More are planning to repair. That’s a meaningful shift in the tone of the market — from investment and improvement toward maintenance and upkeep.
The COVID-era renovation surge didn’t just cool; it appears to be transitioning into a more defensive posture.
One data point worth noting for design professionals: more than 3 in 5 renovating homeowners (61%) plan to stay in their newly renovated homes for at least 11 years. That number has been consistent across 2022, 2023 and 2024.
A client investing for the long term is a different conversation than one flipping for resale — and potentially a more rewarding engagement.
The Professional Hiring Picture: The Numbers That Still Need Explaining
Here’s where things get genuinely interesting — and where the comparison to 2017 gets complicated.
In 2024, 9 in 10 renovating homeowners hired a professional of some kind.
Overall professional hiring is up slightly from previous years: 91% in 2022 and 2023, 90% in 2024. That’s essentially flat, and Houzz frames it as “widespread” professional hiring — which it is.
But look at what’s inside that number.
Specialty service providers (electricians, plumbers, HVAC specialists, roofers) were hired by 49% of renovating homeowners. Construction professionals — general contractors, builders, kitchen/bath remodelers, design-build firms — were hired by 40%. Design-related professionals — architects, interior designers, kitchen/bath designers, landscape architects — were hired by just 22%.
That 22% figure for design professionals is actually down from 24% in 2023.
The report doesn’t highlight this. It’s buried in a chart and presented without year-over-year commentary.
So in a year when bathroom renovation spending is supposedly surging and kitchen projects are commanding $150,000 at the high end, the share of homeowners hiring a designer or architect dropped two percentage points.
If you’re a design professional, that’s the number worth sitting with.
The uncomfortable question from 2017 remains: Houzz’s audience is doing significant, expensive renovation work. They’re browsing ideas, saving photos and building project boards on the platform.
And then, for the most part, they’re calling a general contractor, not a designer.
The Financing Shift: Credit Is Pulling Back Sharply
In 2017, 85% of renovating homeowners used cash or savings. Credit cards were second at 33%. Secured home loans came in third at 15%.
By 2024, cash remained dominant at 84% — essentially unchanged over seven years. But credit card usage fell to 29%, an 8-percentage-point drop year over year. That’s a sharp single-year move, and the cross-generational data makes it more striking: Millennials dropped 5 points, Gen Xers dropped 7 points, and Baby Boomers dropped 8 points. All three major renovation-age cohorts pulled back on credit simultaneously.
Secured home loans — HELOCs( Home Equity Line of Credit), cash-out refinancing, home equity loans — funded just 12% of projects total. HELOCs, which were the primary vehicle for renovation financing before 2022, now account for only 6%. Cash-out refinancing is at 3%. With mortgage rates where they are, this makes sense, but it does mean the easy renovation financing that characterized 2020–2022 is gone.
Ten percent of homeowners used proceeds from a home sale to fund their projects.
These numbers matter if your clients are asking about timing and budgeting — understanding their likely funding source helps you set realistic expectations from the first conversation.
The Generational Picture: Who Is Actually Doing the Work
Baby Boomers drove 59% of renovation activity in 2024 — up 3 percentage points year over year. Gen Xers accounted for 29%, down 3 points. Millennials were just 8%.
That generational dominance by Baby Boomers is significant context for everything else in the report.
When the study reports that 61% of renovating homeowners plan to stay in their homes 11+ years, or that 52% of household heads live with a family member 65 or older, or that the top renovation trigger is “finally having the time” — all of that is largely describing Baby Boomer behavior and motivations.
Millennials — the generation that design professionals often discuss as the “future” of the renovation market — are spending $15,000 at the median, planning to stay in their homes for 11+ years at a rate of only 53% (and that share dropped 4 points year over year), and are the least likely of any generation to hire a design professional at 20%.
If Millennials are your target client, the data suggests they’re not quite there yet — at least not at the scale the platform’s overall numbers might imply.
What Hasn’t Changed
Some things look remarkably similar across seven years of data:
- Pent-up demand continues to be the primary trigger. In 2024, 40% of homeowners cited finally having the time to renovate. Financial readiness was cited by 35%. Same story, different year.
- Finding the right service providers remains the top challenge, cited by 33% of renovating homeowners — the same share as in 2022. If the platform were meaningfully solving the professional-discovery problem, you’d expect this number to move. It hasn’t.
- Home security and automation upgrades continue to grow. In 2024, 22% of renovating homeowners upgraded automation and 21% each upgraded cooling and security systems. These categories have become routine line items in many renovation conversations.
- Most homeowners go over budget. The 2024 data doesn’t break this out directly, but the fact that “staying on budget” remains the third-most-cited renovation challenge (26%) suggests the pattern is intact.
So, What Does It All Mean for Design Professionals?
In 2017, we argued that Houzz data is “nice to know, but so what?” The point wasn’t to dismiss the research — it was to push professionals toward using their own customer data as the real baseline.
Seven years of longitudinal data from the same source does add something new: it reveals which trends are structural and which are cyclical.
The structural shifts:
- Bathrooms have reached parity with kitchens as a renovation priority, though the “equal” framing flattens real distinctions between guest and primary bath spending.
- High-end spending on major kitchen and bathroom remodels is holding up even as overall medians decline — the market is bifurcating, not simply contracting.
- Professional hiring overall is stable, but design professional hiring specifically is declining as a share of that total.
The cyclical shift:
- The post-COVID renovation surge has clearly moderated. Median spend dropped 17% in a single year. Credit card financing pulled back sharply across all generations. The planned 2025 median spend is back to 2017 levels in nominal terms.
The questions from 2017 are still the right ones. Here are the concrete recommendations that follow from them:
- Know your own numbers first. Before you benchmark yourself against national medians, calculate your own: average project value, average client tenure, average number of projects per client per year. Houzz data tells you about the market. Your data tells you about your business.
- Position deliberately within the bifurcated market. If major kitchen remodels at the high end are holding while the middle is softening, decide explicitly which segment you serve — and price, market and prospect accordingly. Don’t let the softening middle set your floor.
- Treat the platform as top-of-funnel, not a strategy. The data confirms that homeowners are using Houzz for inspiration and discovery, then bypassing design professionals at a higher rate than a year ago. If you’re investing heavily in Houzz presence without a clear plan to convert that attention into direct relationships — email list, direct consultations, referral follow-through — you’re subsidizing a discovery process that ends with someone else getting the call.
Seven years of Houzz data confirms the platform is an extraordinary window into renovation behavior. But a window isn’t a strategy. You still have to decide what to do with the view.
Let me hear from you. jim@interlinegroup.com
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The 2025 U.S. Houzz & Home Study covers 2024 renovation activity and was fielded between January 7 and February 28, 2025, with 20,953 U.S. homeowner respondents. Data referenced from the 2017 period reflects the 2018 Houzz & Home report covering 2017 renovation activity. Both are available through Houzz Research.