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U.S. cities where bedroom sizes are shrinking — and where they're growing

New-construction bedrooms have gotten noticeably tighter in many cities. Eachnight's latest report highlights a few cities moving the opposite way

Home buyers walking into a newly built house often expect more space than what they actually get. Builders have kept bedroom counts close to four per home even as total square footage has pulled back from the peak reached during the previous decade, meaning each bedroom now competes for a smaller share of the floor plan than it did a generation ago. That squeeze shows up most in the primary and secondary bedrooms, where a bed, a dresser and enough floor space to walk around used to fit with room to spare. Shoppers accustomed to judging a home by its total square footage rarely think to ask how that space actually gets divided among individual rooms, and the answer increasingly favors closets, common areas and storage over the private rooms where people spend their nights.

National data on new single-family construction bears out that squeeze. Average bedroom space in homes built during the 2020s fell to an estimated 189 square feet, down from a peak of 206 square feet during the previous decade, even as the typical new home continued to carry close to four bedrooms. Builders have leaned into smaller footprints to hold down prices amid high land and material costs, often trimming secondary bedrooms and shared living space rather than removing a bedroom from the floor plan. Buyers have responded by prioritizing flexible rooms, like a home office or a workout space, over generously sized bedrooms, giving builders less incentive to protect that square footage when drawing up a new floor plan. Local zoning, land costs and buyer demographics all shape how much of a home's footprint ends up in the bedrooms, and those forces differ enormously by market.

Eachnight tracked the shift by comparing 39,591 single-family home listings across 73 U.S. cities, weighing newer construction built in 2015 or later against homes built between 1990 and 2005, the tail end of the country's home-size expansion era. Because listing data doesn't break out individual room dimensions, the analysis applies a National Association of Home Builders finding that bedrooms typically account for 28 percent of a home's finished floor space, then divides that figure by bedroom count to estimate how much room each bedroom gets. Three cities posted the steepest declines in that estimate, and three posted the largest gains, with the rest of the 73 cities landing somewhere in between.

Shrinking fastest: Portland, Oregon

Ryan Manwiller / Unsplash

A house in Portland, Ore. built between 1990 and 2005 offered an estimated 229 square feet per bedroom. New construction from 2015 onward has averaged just 159 square feet per bedroom, a drop of more than 30 percent, the steepest decline among the 73 cities eachnight analyzed. Builders in the area have kept bedroom counts close to the nationwide average of roughly four per home, which means the shrinking square footage has come almost entirely out of the space allotted to each room rather than out of the number of rooms itself.

The city's own housing policy explains a large share of that shift. Portland has spent the past several years loosening zoning rules that once required a single detached house on most residential lots, opening the door to duplexes, triplexes and other compact housing types on land that used to hold one larger home. That kind of infill construction tends to produce smaller floor plans by design, since builders divide a lot's square footage among more units instead........

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