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Yes, the best direct evidence indicates that state abortion bans can affect housing markets, with the clearest changes appearing in rental housing. A March 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper estimates that states adopting total bans after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had lower rents and higher rental-vacancy rates than a constructed comparison group. The estimated effects on home values and homeowner vacancies are smaller and statistically uncertain.
Those results apply to 13 states with total bans, not every abortion restriction or every local housing market. They also describe conditions through June 2025; they are estimates from a working paper, not a forecast of what every market will do.
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What changed in rental markets after the bans?
The strongest measured relationship is a combination of cheaper rents and more empty rental units. In the study by Daniel L. Dench, Kelly Lifchez, Jason M. Lindo and Jancy Ling Liu, the figures are changes relative to a reweighted comparison of states that maintained or expanded abortion access.
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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →| Housing measure | Average effect, July 2022–June 2025 | Effect, July 2024–June 2025 | How certain is the estimate? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rent index | Estimated 2.2% decline | Estimated 4.0% decline | Statistically significant at conventional levels: p=0.047 for the full period; the 95% confidence interval is approximately −4.4% to 0.0%. |
| Rental vacancy rate | Estimated increase of 1.1 percentage points | Estimated increase of 1.8 percentage points | The most recent-year estimate has a 95% confidence interval of 0.48 to 3.14 percentage points. |
| Home values | Estimated 1.8% decline | Estimated 2.9% decline | Not statistically significant at conventional levels. |
| Homeowner vacancy rate | Estimated increase of about 0.2 percentage points | Not stated separately in the reported results | Not statistically significant at conventional levels. |
The rent estimates describe an average across the treated states and the study period. They are not a promise that a particular city’s rent fell by the same percentage. A 2.2% estimate would correspond to about $33 per month on a $1,500 rent, while a 4.0% estimate would be about $60; those calculations illustrate the percentages rather than report observed changes for an individual lease.
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The paired movement in rents and vacancies matters. If supply had expanded suddenly while demand stayed unchanged, vacancies could rise and prices could fall. The authors report that the results remain when they control for building permits, a housing-supply indicator. They interpret the remaining pattern as consistent with weaker demand for housing in ban states.
How the main study estimated the effect
A synthetic difference-in-differences comparison
The NBER Working Paper 34921, dated March 2026, uses a synthetic difference-in-differences design. First, the researchers identify states that implemented total abortion bans after the June 2022 Dobbs decision. They then reweight areas in states that protected or maintained abortion access to create a counterfactual whose pre-Dobbs housing trends resemble those of the ban states. The estimated post-ban gap is the reported effect.
This approach is intended to separate the policy change from housing movements that were already occurring or that affected much of the country. It does not mean the authors observed a separate, identical control city for each treated city. The comparison is a statistical construction based on pre-period trends.
Different data for prices and vacancies
- Rent and home-value indices are county-level measures from Zillow.
- Rental and homeowner vacancy rates come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancy Survey and are measured at the metropolitan statistical area level.
- The treatment period begins in the third quarter of 2022 and runs through June 2025.
- Building permits are included in a robustness check to account for changes in housing supply.
The mismatch in geographic units is important when applying the findings. A county rent index and a metropolitan vacancy rate do not describe exactly the same set of properties, and neither necessarily captures conditions in a single neighborhood.
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Which states and laws are covered?
The treatment group contains Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The paper treats these as states implementing total bans after Dobbs, while recognizing that their legal paths were not identical.
- West Virginia enacted a new ban in September 2022.
- Wisconsin’s pre-Roe statute operated until judicial intervention in September 2023.
- The analysis begins in the third quarter of 2022 rather than assigning every state the same day on which enforcement changed.
States with partial restrictions, delayed enforcement or substantial legal uncertainty are excluded from the main treatment comparison. Consequently, the paper does not establish that a six-week limit, a medication-abortion restriction or another partial policy has the same housing effect as a total ban. It also does not estimate the effect of later legal changes after June 2025.
Why could reproductive policy affect housing demand?
Housing is partly a market for place-based amenities. People choose where to live based on jobs, schools, taxes, safety, health care and legal rights, in addition to the physical characteristics of a home. The authors describe reproductive rights as another amenity that can be valued through location decisions.
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A household that places a high value on access to abortion may avoid moving to, or may leave, a state with a total ban. Fewer potential renters would reduce demand. Landlords facing more empty units could lower asking rents or offer concessions, producing the observed combination of lower rents and higher vacancies.
Renters can adjust at lease renewal, so their location decisions may respond faster than homeowners’ decisions. Selling a home involves brokerage costs, financing constraints and the risk of not finding a replacement property, which can make owner-occupier responses slower and noisier in the data. This is a proposed mechanism consistent with the estimates, not a direct record of why each household moved.
The paper cites earlier migration research that finds larger responses among single-person households and effects that grow over time. Migration can be one pathway through which demand changes, but migration statistics are not themselves measures of rent, vacancy or home value.
What other evidence says about moving and temporary lodging
Government review of household and economic research
A May 2025 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed 55 studies after screening 611 studies through a multi-step search and quality assessment. The reviewed literature suggests that abortion restrictions can influence women’s decisions about where to live, as well as education, economic outcomes and other household measures.
That review provides context for a possible housing-demand channel, but it does not provide a national rent or home-value estimate. It should therefore be read alongside, not as a substitute for, the NBER housing analysis.
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Airbnb near abortion clinics is a different market
A 2024 study by Sehgal, Hswen, Cantor, Upadhyay, Reis, Remmel, Brownstein and Rader examined short-term lodging rather than residential housing. Using average monthly data for 2,349,635 Airbnb listings (standard deviation 111,578) between October 2020 and April 2023, the researchers compared one-bedroom entire-place rentals within a 30-minute drive of abortion clinics.
| Short-term lodging result | Study detail |
|---|---|
| Occupancy near clinics in ban states | Estimated 1.4 percentage-point decrease |
| Post-Dobbs six-month translation | Estimated 16,548 fewer short-term renters |
| Related revenue estimate | Estimated $1.87 million less revenue for the defined short-term rentals |
| What it does not measure | Long-term residential rents, home prices or general housing vacancies |
The Airbnb result is consistent with fewer clinic-related trips or different travel patterns, but it cannot be used to claim that long-term apartment rents fell by the same amount.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to interpret the home-value findings
The estimated home-value decline of 1.8% over the three post-Dobbs years, and 2.9% in the latest year, is not statistically significant in the paper. “Not statistically significant” means the study’s uncertainty range is wide enough that a zero effect cannot be ruled out at conventional thresholds. It does not prove that home values were unchanged, nor does it establish a decline.
The same caution applies to the roughly 0.2-percentage-point increase in homeowner vacancies. Owner-occupied markets may respond differently from rentals, or the available data may not be precise enough to distinguish a policy effect from normal price and turnover variation.
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What the estimates mean for people making housing decisions
Renters
State-level averages should not be treated as a negotiation benchmark for a specific lease. Local employment, new construction, insurance costs, college enrollment and neighborhood amenities can overwhelm a statewide policy-related estimate. Check current comparable listings, vacancy conditions and lease concessions in the exact metropolitan area before assuming rents will fall.
Home buyers and owners
The available evidence does not support a reliable rule that a ban will reduce a home’s value by a particular percentage. A buyer should not convert the rent estimate into a home-price forecast. Property-specific factors, mortgage rates and local supply remain central, while the owner-occupied estimates in this study are uncertain.
Employers and policymakers
Relocation decisions can affect labor supply, rental absorption and municipal tax bases, but the NBER paper does not estimate those downstream fiscal or employment effects. Policymakers evaluating housing should distinguish an increase in vacancy caused by weaker demand from one caused by newly built units, because the remedies and distributional consequences differ.
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- Working-paper status: NBER Working Paper 34921 is circulated for discussion and comment. It has not been peer-reviewed or reviewed by the NBER Board of Directors.
- Limited treatment group: the estimates concern 13 total-ban states and exclude several partial or legally uncertain regimes.
- Time boundary: outcomes are measured through June 2025, so the paper does not provide post-June-2025 estimates.
- Average effects: a state-level average can conceal differences between metropolitan areas, rural markets and neighborhoods.
- Mechanism uncertainty: the demand-shift explanation fits the rent-and-vacancy pattern, but the study does not interview every mover or identify the reason for each household’s housing choice.
- Outcome differences: rental prices, rental vacancies, home values and homeowner vacancies are separate measures and should not be substituted for one another.
Bottom line
The best direct evidence says state total abortion bans are associated with a measurable softening in rental markets: rents were estimated to be lower and rental vacancies higher relative to a carefully constructed comparison group, with the gap larger in the most recent year studied. Evidence for home values and homeowner vacancies is inconclusive. The result is therefore a qualified housing-market effect—strongest for rentals, limited to the studied total-ban states and period—not proof that every abortion restriction lowers housing prices everywhere.
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