Housing Price Index Frequently Asked Questions (2024)

The FHFA House Price Index^® (FHFA HPI^®) is a broad economic measure of the movement of single-family house prices in the United States. Although FHFA constructs several indexes for different market geographies and periods, it often references the entire suite of indexes as the “FHFA HPI.” All the indexes are created in the same technical manner. The flagship FHFA HPI is the purchase-only index which uses seasonally adjusted, purchase-only (PO) data; and is the data most referenced in press releases, news stories, and social media. FHFA created additional indexes to address questions about house price changes in other market segments such as the all-transections (AT) index that includes refinances data, or the expanded PO index that includes purchase data on entire single-family property market.​

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has approved two federally registered trademarks: “FHFA House Price Index^®" and “FHFA HPI^®". These trademarks cover the entire suite of indexes and FHFA intends them to protect Agency branding, usage, and intellectual property. Users can download all indexes from the FHFA HPI main web page.

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The Agency builds the FHFA HPI suite on tens of millions of home sales and offers insights about house price fluctuations at the national, census division, state, metro area, county, ZIP code, and census tract levels. It uses a fully transparent methodology based upon a weighted, repeat-sales statistical technique to analyze transaction data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This technique helps to control for differences in the quality of the houses comprising the sample and is why we refer to the FHFA HPI as a “constant quality” index. This distinction is important when comparing summary statistics like mean or median values (such as those provided by the American Community Survey or the Decennial Census) that inherently reflect changes to both the price and quantity of housing. By isolating price changes, the FHFA HPI better reflects the average appreciation in an area.

The FHFA HPI also is a useful analytical tool for many housing finance topics such as updating the current value of residential property assets, estimating potential mort- gage default and any losses given default, predicting prepayment speeds for financial securities, and gauging differences in housing affordability in specific geographic areas. Researchers have used FHFA HPI data for hundreds of studies about business cycles, demographic challenges, environmental or disaster risks, labor markets, local government budgets, migration, political elections, property taxation, urban revival, and wealth creation.​

FHFA releases HPI reports monthly and quarterly. We always post calendar dates at the bottom of the FHFA HPI main webpage or at https://www.fhfa.gov/DataTools/Downloads/Pages/House-Price-Index.aspx#ReleaseDates

FHFA announces release dates at the end of every summer for the following calendar year. We post the reports and data at 9 a.m. on those days. Each month, consolidated reports highlight trends for certain regions (census divisions) as well as the entire country. Every three months, a more comprehensive report appends additional quarterly information about those areas while including new coverage for states and cities.​

​Most statistics in the reports reference price changes computed by FHFA’s flagship “purchase-only” HPI. In some cases, however, the statistics reference alternative price measures. These additional house price indexes use the same general methodology as the flagship index but have slight differences as follows:

• “All-Transactions” house price index. We add appraisal values from refinance mortgages to the purchase-only data sample.
• “Expanded-Data” house price index. We append the purchase-only data sample with FHA-backed mortgage transactions as well as sales price information sourced from county recorder offices (with sales prices below the annual loan limit value ceiling). We use this index annually to adjust the maximum conforming loan limit values, which dictate the dollar amount of loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can acquire.
• “Distress-Free” house price index. We remove sales of bank-owned properties and short sales from the purchase-only dataset prior to estimating the index.
• “Annual” house price index. We use the all-transactions data but construct indexes on a yearly basis to provide data for very small geographic areas like counties, ZIP codes, and census tracts. Data constraints preclude FHFA from producing all types of indexes for every geo- graphic area, but multiple index types are generally available. For individual states, for instance, we make several types of indexes available. The various indexes tend to correlate closely over the long-term, but short-term differences can be significant.

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