In 2017, the 78 percent of veteran households were homeowners, 14 percentage points higher than for the total population. Active-duty servicemembers, who are mobile and often have housing provided on a military base, had a 43 percent homeownership rate, considerably lower than for veterans and the total population.
Because older people are more likely to be homeowners and because many veterans are older than 55, we calculate the homeownership rate for three age buckets: ages 18 to 34, ages 35 to 54, and ages 55 and older. For the youngest two age buckets, veteran households have the highest homeownership rate and active-duty servicemembers have the lowest. But for household heads ages 55 and older, active-duty servicemember households have the highest homeownership rate (87 percent). For all age buckets, the homeownership gaps between veteran households and the total population are between 5 and 10 percentage points, lower than the 14 percentage-point gap in figure 4, which did not consider age.
Figure 6 shows homeownership rates by race or ethnicity. For all five groups, veteran households have higher homeownership rates than the total population. The racial and ethnic homeownership gap is smaller for veteran households and active-duty military households compared with the total population. For example, the black-white homeownership gap is 30 percentage points for the total population but is 19 percentage points among veteran households and 11 percentage points among households with active-duty servicemembers.
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