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U.S. homes in February sat on the market for more than two months, the longest amount of time recorded for any February in nearly a decade, as the national housing market continues its slow, steady crawl back to pre-pandemic reality.
Homes across the country spent a median of 66 days on the market in February, a nearly 14 percent increase from last year, when homes lingered on the market for a median of 58 days. That’s according to data from brokerage and data firm Redfin, which calculates median days on market from when a home is listed to when it goes under contract; the firm excludes properties that have been on the market for more than a year.
Though the winter typically sees a slowdown in dealmaking, February’s figure is the highest recorded for any February since 2016, when the median was 73 days.
The current pace is a sharp contrast to the record lows of February 2022, when intense competition during the pandemic pushed the national median to just 28 days. Mortgage rates are about double what they had been during the pandemic, and affordability remains a concern for many buyers.
Still, the slowdown does not signal major troubles.
“What we’re seeing now is a reversion to long-term norms as opposed to some sort of slowdown that exemplifies weaker conditions of the market,” said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel.
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The days-on-market metric, which feeds off of a market’s inventory of available homes, is also highly location specific.
“We are seeing more inventory, but the whole country isn’t — it’s like half the country,” Miller said. “And so that’s making days on market skew higher.”
In February, there were about 1.25 million homes on the market across the country, slightly below the 1.29 million in February 2025 and well below the 14-year median of about 1.4 million, according to Redfin.
But in places like Houston, a Sun Belt metro that has long been struggling with supply issues, there were almost 31,000 properties on the market in February, more than 7,100 properties above its 14-year median. Among the top 10 metro areas by population, its median days on the market figure of 82 was the third highest.
Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. had the lowest days-on-market median, of just 52 days — up more than 44 percent year over year. In February the nation’s capitol had about 10,000 homes up for sale, about 3,000 fewer than the typical amount.
In Manhattan specifically, the 20-year average days on market is 114 days, according to Miller Samuel’s data, which calculates days on market from the last listing price to the date a property goes into contract. For 2024, the average was 80 days, and in 2025, it was 82 days.
“Manhattan, specifically, is continuing to move faster than normal,” Miller said. “The Northeast doesn’t have the excess supply that we see in the Sun Belt. So hence, days on market is faster here.”