American households spent an average of $12,472 on their homes in 2025, according to Angi’s newly released 2025 State of Home Spending Report. That total climbed 3.5% from the year before, and it didn’t go toward one splashy remodel. Angi’s data splits it three ways across roughly 10 separate projects per household over the year: $9,288 on improvements, $2,041 on routine maintenance, and $1,143 on emergency repairs. The number also hides a real generational split. Millennial homeowners spent $14,199 on their homes in 2025, while Gen Z homeowners spent $10,283, a gap of nearly $4,000 between the generation doing the most active work on its houses and the one doing the least.
What Counts as Improvement, Maintenance, and Emergency
The three categories in Angi’s report aren’t interchangeable, and the distinction matters for how you should think about your own home budget. Improvements are the discretionary, planned upgrades a homeowner chooses to make because they want a better kitchen, a finished basement, or an added bathroom, not because something broke. At $9,288, that bucket accounts for roughly three-quarters of total annual spending, which tracks with a home-improvement market still shaped by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, whose Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity has tracked steady, if unspectacular, growth in renovation spending through 2026.
Maintenance, at $2,041, is the routine, recurring upkeep that doesn’t reinvent a house but keeps it from deteriorating: gutter cleaning, HVAC servicing, exterior painting, appliance tune-ups. It’s the smallest of the three categories, and that’s arguably the number worth watching most closely, because underspending here is exactly what turns into the third category. Emergency repairs, at $1,143, are the unplanned, unbudgeted fixes: a burst pipe, a failed water heater, storm damage. Every dollar in that bucket is a dollar a homeowner didn’t choose to spend and almost certainly would have preferred to avoid by catching the problem earlier.
Why the 3.5% Jump Isn’t Happening in a Vacuum
A 3.5% year-over-year increase in home spending doesn’t occur in isolation from what it costs to actually get the work done. The National Association of Home Builders has been tracking building-material prices remaining elevated even as overall construction activity has cooled, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ producer price data for construction inputs shows the same persistent pressure on lumber, appliances, and finished goods that feed directly into both remodeling projects and repair bills. Contractor labor has moved in a similar direction, since a tight supply of skilled tradespeople gives installers and specialty contractors more room to raise rates. None of that shows up as a single line item on a homeowner’s invoice, but it’s the backdrop against which a national average can climb by 3.5% even if the actual scope of work, a new roof, a repainted room, a replaced water heater, looks the same as it did the year before.
The Millennial-Gen Z Gap, and What’s Behind It
The widest divide in Angi’s report isn’t between improvements and maintenance. It’s between generations. Millennials, now largely in their 30s and early 40s, are disproportionately the buyers who purchased homes over the past decade, often older starter properties that came with deferred work already built into the price. Combine that with a life stage defined by growing families, more square footage in daily use, and enough years of homeownership to have hit the point where original systems and finishes need attention, and $14,199 in annual spending starts to look less like an outlier and more like where that cohort was always headed.
Gen Z homeowners sit at the other end for reasons that mirror the same logic in reverse. They’re newer to owning property, more likely to be in smaller or newer-construction homes with fewer accumulated maintenance needs, and simply haven’t had the years of ownership that let deferred projects pile up. A $10,283 average isn’t a sign of less ambition. It’s a function of shorter tenure and less square footage to maintain, a pattern well documented in housing research on how renovation spending scales with a home’s age and how long its owner has lived there.
Where That Leaves Your Own Number
Angi’s average gives homeowners something concrete to check their own year against, not a target to hit. If your 2025 home spending came in well under $12,472, particularly if maintenance was the category you skipped, that gap doesn’t disappear. It usually resurfaces later as an emergency repair bill, at a higher price than the tune-up would have cost. If you spent well above that figure, especially somewhere near the $14,199 Millennial average, you’re not overspending so much as running on the same schedule as the generation currently doing the heaviest lifting on America’s aging housing stock. Either way, the number worth tracking isn’t the national average itself. It’s whether your own spending is shaped by choice or by what you put off last year.
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