Where Home Prices Rose Most

The supporting columns show on a wider screen, and every column is in the CSV.

Methodology

Percent change in the FHFA House Price Index (traditional, all-transactions) between the latest quarter and the same quarter five years earlier. The index follows repeat sales of the same homes, so it measures price change rather than which homes happened to sell. It covers mortgages bought or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A rise says nothing about whether homes are affordable: it is a change from wherever prices started, and a market that began cheap can rise furthest.

Some entries here hold the same value and therefore the same rank. Where that happens the rank is printed once and the rows beneath it are left blank, because the order they appear in carries no meaning — there is nothing in the measurements to separate them.

What is excluded, and why

Metropolitan areas under 250,000 residents. Also not ranked: the metros FHFA publishes only by metropolitan division rather than as a whole (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and a few others), because a division is part of a metro and not a like-for-like entry beside a whole one.

The top 40 of the 179 metros that meet these criteria are listed.

Sources

• U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency — House Price Index (traditional, all-transactions) (HPI master file, quarterly)

Full details of how signals and the Area Score are calculated are on the methodology page, and how rankings like this one are built and reviewed is on the editorial policy page.