America’s pandemic-era love affair with buying homes in cold, hard cash is finally cooling.
All-cash purchases accounted for 31.4% of US home sales during the first four months of 2026, down from 32.3% a year earlier, according to new Realtor.com research.
And cash buyers are retreating faster than the housing market as a whole: The number of cash sales dropped 11.2% year-over-year, compared with an 8.5% decline in total home sales.
That’s a shift from the pandemic years, when buyers routinely ditched the mortgage to elbow their way to the front of bidding wars.
But don’t declare the death of the cash buyer just yet.
Cash remains more common than before the pandemic — and in certain cities, and at both extremes of the housing market, buyers are still plunking down the entire purchase price without borrowing a dime.
“We’re really just in this holding pattern,” Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com and author of the report, told The Post.
Cash has a new superpower: certainty
During the pandemic, cash was a battering ram.
With buyers fighting over scarce listings, an all-cash offer could vault one bidder over a pile of competitors.
Today, buyers have more options in many parts of the country as inventory has recovered and competition has cooled.
“In a lot of the country, the market is a lot less competitive,” Jones said. “You don’t have to come forward with cash in every situation.”
But cash hasn’t lost its appeal to sellers. Its superpower has simply changed.
During the pandemic, Jones said, sellers viewed cash as “the best offer of a lot of really good offers.”
Today, with financing harder for some buyers to secure, cash can instead be “the most solid, stable, reliable offer” — one that isn’t going to collapse because financing falls through.
Cash used to help buyers win the race. Now it can help sellers make sure they actually cross the finish line.
The rich are playing a different housing game
The national decline hides a striking divide over who is still reaching for the checkbook.
More than two-thirds of homes selling for less than $100,000 were purchased without a mortgage.
Jump to the opposite end of the market and cash comes roaring back: More than 40% of $1 million-plus homes were bought in cash, while a majority of $2 million-plus purchases required no financing.
In between are ordinary buyers who remain much more dependent on mortgages.
But the people buying a $75,000 fixer-upper and a $5 million mansion aren’t exactly shopping from the same playbook.
At the lower end, investors, financing difficulties and credit barriers can push transactions toward cash.
At the top, the explanation is simpler: The buyers have the money.
Jones said the divide reflects what economists call a “K-shaped housing market,” where different groups of buyers are experiencing vastly different realities.
“People on the high end are living in a different world than a lot of the people in the middle,” she said.
Miami is still the cash capital
Nowhere is cash more prevalent among major metros than Miami.
Some 43.2% of sales in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro were completed without a mortgage in early 2026 — the highest share among the major metros analyzed.
The city’s mix of affluent buyers, retirees and second-home owners helps keep cash king even as its popularity fades nationally.
But the cash map gets considerably stranger from there.
Kansas City, Houston, San Antonio and St. Louis also ranked among the country’s most cash-heavy major metros — showing that the phenomenon isn’t confined to millionaire playgrounds.
And some cities are actually bucking the national retreat. Pittsburgh saw the number of cash purchases surge 22.6%, the largest increase among major metros, while San Francisco posted a 7.7% jump.
AI money may be finding its way home
San Francisco’s increase is particularly notable because buying a home there outright requires significantly deeper pockets.
Cash transactions there increased 7.7% even with an average sale price north of $1.1 million.
Realtor.com said the trend is consistent with an injection of wealth from the artificial-intelligence boom — including fundraising, IPOs and stock compensation that can leave newly flush tech workers with enough liquidity to bypass financing.
The data doesn’t prove AI wealth caused the increase, but it offers another potential glimpse at how the tech boom is spilling into housing.
Mortgage buyers are clawing back ground in New York
Closer to home, cash buyers are moving in the opposite direction — and financed buyers may finally be getting an opening.
Cash accounted for 32% of sales across the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro from January through May, down 3.2 percentage points from the same period last year, according to additional Realtor.com data provided to The Post.
The number of cash sales plunged 25%, compared with an 18.5% drop in overall transactions.
That’s a notable reversal for a market where cash buyers have proved remarkably resilient.
In 2025, 34.7% of metro-area purchases were made in cash — 3.7 percentage points higher than in 2019 — even as the median sale price soared 64% over that period.
But the landscape has begun to shift.
Inventory in New York City has climbed year-over-year since February 2025, while prices have generally eased. Combined with lower mortgage rates earlier this year, those conditions have created more opportunities for buyers who need financing, according to Realtor.com.
The numbers suggest more financed buyers have been able to make their way back into the market.
New Jersey offers another glimmer of hope
The shift is even more pronounced across the Hudson.
Just 24.6% of New Jersey home sales were all-cash from January through May, down 3.7 percentage points from the same period last year.
That’s happening even as the Garden State’s housing market remains painfully expensive.
New Jersey’s median sale price soared 75.5% between 2019 and 2025, while overall sales plunged 27.9% as rising prices and scarce inventory squeezed the market.
Cash buyers initially weathered that squeeze slightly better than their mortgage-dependent counterparts. But this year, cash sales have fallen faster than overall transactions.
The reason may be that buyers who need a mortgage finally have a little more room to breathe.
Inventory in New Jersey has increased year-over-year since April 2024, while asking prices have fallen for the past 14 months, according to Realtor.com.
Jones said the changing cash numbers suggest there is now “a little bit more slack in the New Jersey market,” allowing financed buyers to compete after several punishing years.
Still, conditions remain far more challenging than they were before the pandemic.
Finally, some good news for regular buyers?
The shift in New York and New Jersey reflects a broader possibility for Americans who don’t happen to have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around.
A falling cash share can mean buyers no longer need cash to compete as aggressively — or that financing has become accessible enough for mortgage-dependent buyers to return.
“Both of those things are good news,” Jones said.
For much of early 2026, mortgage rates were lower than a year earlier, giving financed buyers some breathing room.
But that progress is fragile. Rates have since climbed again, Jones noted, potentially pushing would-be buyers back to the sidelines.
So the housing market hasn’t suddenly become buyer-friendly.
Instead, Jones said, it is inching “towards more balance.”
For buyers who spent years watching cash offers sail past them, even that may be a start.
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