Carly Berlin covers housing and infrastructure for Vermont Public, in partnership with VTDigger.
One in five Vermonters report that they have struggled to keep up with housing payments in the last year.
That’s according to the Vermont Public 2026 Poll. Twenty percent of people surveyed in September said they have been late or come up short on rent or mortgage payments because of other financial burdens in the past year. Another 12% indicated that they almost fell behind on those payments.
The poll results underscore just how many Vermonters live with some degree of housing precarity. Lapsed payments make people vulnerable to eviction or foreclosure. Housing costs have spiked in Vermont amid a historic housing shortage in recent years, and mortgage rates have remained stubbornly high, too. Wages have not kept up.
The median sale price of a primary home last year reached $379,000, a more than 91% increase from 10 years prior, according to state property transfer tax data. In 2021, nearly a third of all Vermont renters had the income needed to buy a median-priced home, but that number plunged to 6% just two years later, according to the state’s most recent Housing Needs Assessment.
Vermont’s cost of living was top of mind for poll respondents, as was housing — typically a person’s single greatest expense. Thirty-one percent of people surveyed said the most important problem facing the state is affordability or the economy. Another 13% named housing and homelessness as their top issue.
Young people are more likely to have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments than older Vermonters, according to the poll results. Twenty-seven percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 44 indicated they struggled to keep up with housing expenses, compared to 22% of people between 45 and 64 and 9% of people over the age of 65.
Liz Courtney, 46, lives in an intergenerational home in Wolcott. She and her husband bought the house with Courtney’s parents a few years ago, expecting to share expenses. But then the marketing and communications firm where Courtney works cut back her hours. She and her husband recently launched a music recording studio, but have yet to turn a profit as they pay off their start-up expenses.
Courtney’s mother, who’s on a fixed income, has taken on more of the mortgage payments — something that has left Courtney feeling stress and guilt, she said. Meanwhile, she has been accumulating credit card debt, and her family dropped their health insurance after pandemic-era premium subsidies ended, she said.
“We’re putting off repairs on our septic system and our deck,” Courtney said. “The kids are at an age where we’d love to take them to Disney World, and I’m like, well, I don’t know how that’s going to happen in the next couple of years.”
Jennifer Beane-Edgar, 43, works as an administrative assistant in a dentist’s office and lives with her children in a small subsidized apartment in Hartford, she said. She’d like to move into a bigger unit, but affordable options are limited nearby, and she needs to stay local to keep her kids with disabilities close to services.
Beane-Edgar has been able to keep up with her rent. But it hasn’t always been easy.
“Sometimes it’s choosing between, you know, medical necessities for my kids, or gas in the car, or food,” Beane-Edgar said.
Over 30% of all Vermont households were considered cost-burdened as of 2024, meaning they pay more than a third of their monthly income toward housing expenses — making it difficult to afford other basic necessities, like food, transportation and healthcare. That roughly lines up with the national average.
One recent national study found that a growing number of middle-income renters have fallen behind on rent payments due in part to the rising costs of everyday essentials.
