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These U.S. towns have more vacation homes than full-time residents

Some resort towns sit empty for much of each year. Realtor.com ranked the U.S. markets where seasonal housing dominates

Drive through a beach town in February or a ski village in June and you'll notice how few lights are on. Shutters stay closed, driveways sit empty, and the grocery store runs a skeleton schedule until the season turns. In a small set of American communities, housing bought by people who show up a few weeks a year makes up a large enough share of the stock to set the terms for everyone else. Restaurants and shops that depend on local trade budget around a handful of busy months, and the workers who staff them bid for whatever housing hasn't been claimed by owners who don't need a local paycheck to afford it. Scarcity of that kind reaches well past real estate, shaping who can take a job in town and who has to live somewhere cheaper to keep it.

Across the country, homes held for seasonal or occasional use account for 3.3% of all housing, so a community where a quarter of the homes sit dark most of the year is running on different math than the rest of the market. Luxury pricing has been drifting down for more than two years, with annual declines now stretching 27 straight months. The entry price to luxury fell 1.7% to $1,277,907 in June, a steeper yearly slide than the 1.4% drop recorded in May. Buyers kept moving anyway, since luxury listings took a median of 63 days to sell, two days quicker than in June 2025, and ultraluxury homes, the 99th percentile of listing prices, sold three days faster than a year earlier.

Realtor.com pulled seasonal-housing counts from the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 American Community Survey, measured them against the full housing stock of every metropolitan and micropolitan area, and limited its June 2026 luxury housing report to places carrying at least 100 million-dollar listings that month. Anthony Smith, a senior economist at the firm, said buyers in vacation towns pay for a setting nobody can copy rather than for floor space, since no builder can add coastline or raise a new mountain range. Entry to the costliest 10% of listings runs past $14 million in the market with the heaviest seasonal concentration, even though the typical home there priced between $1 million and $2 million measures about a third of the national median of 3,000 square feet.

Nantucket, Massachusetts

Fifty-five percent of the homes on Nantucket, Mass., are reserved for vacation or seasonal use, a heavier share than Realtor.com found anywhere else among luxury markets. The national rate sits at 3.3%, so the island carries about 17 times what the rest of the country does, and the imbalance shows up in daily life long before it shows up on a listing sheet. Year-round residents hold the minority of the housing on their own island, and anything they might buy is priced against someone shopping for a second home they'll use a few weeks a year.

The median asking price on the island hit $4,925,000 in June 2026, more than 11 times the national median listing price of $430,000. The typical Nantucket home also costs close to four times the $1,277,907 that marks the national entry point into luxury, which puts the middle of this market above the line the rest of the country treats as its high end. At the other end of the island's inventory, the cheapest listing in the most expensive 10% starts at $14,117,250, the steepest entry point anywhere on the ranking and more than two and a half times the $5,513,735 threshold that defines ultraluxury nationally.

No market in the report posts a smaller typical home in the $1 million to $2 million range than Nantucket, where 1,011 square feet buys in at that price, roughly a third of the 3,000-square-foot national median in the same band. Spend $1.5 million on the island and you get a cottage rather than a family compound, so the premium attaches to the address instead of the floor plan. An island has a fixed amount of land, no annexation to pursue, and no suburban edge to push into, so price absorbs whatever demand arrives. Sellers on Nantucket work from that local scarcity rather than the national trend, which has pulled the luxury threshold down for 27 straight months.

Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts

At $2,500,000, the median listing price in Vineyard Haven, Mass., runs close to double the $1,277,907 national entry point to luxury, so the middle of this market begins where the top 10% of the rest of the country starts. Realtor.com ranks the Vineyard Haven micro area second in the nation for vacation-home concentration, and the pricing follows, as the typical asking price runs nearly six times the $430,000 national median. Buyers reaching for the upper end face a far steeper climb, since the priciest 10% of listings open at $8,235,000, more than six times the national luxury threshold.

Square $SQ footage is where island money stops stretching. Among homes priced between $1 million and $2 million, the median here measures 1,652 square feet, roughly 1,350 square feet short of the 3,000-square-foot national median in that same price band. A $1.5 million budget buys a substantial family house across most of the country and something closer to a cottage on the island, because buyers are paying for a fixed quantity of shoreline rather than........

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