‘Hotel of mum and dad’ in UK at its fullest in two decades, study finds
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Almost a fifth of adults aged 24-34 are living with parents, particularly in areas of high-cost housing. The “hotel of mum and dad” is the busiest it has been for two decades as an increasing number of young adults in the UK choose – or are forced by low wages and rising rents – to live with their parents, research has found.
The prohibitive cost of renting, let alone buying, a home explains why more twenty- and thirtysomethings are “co-residing” with family at an age when their parents would have been living independently, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said. An estimated 1.7 million adults in the UK aged 24-34 are living with parents, almost 20% of the total cohort and an increase of 450,000 since 2006, when 13% of this age group lived at home. The trend is most acute in London and other areas where housing costs are high.
The cohort of young adults who return to the family home to live after university, relationship breakups, or other life shocks has been dubbed the “boomerang generation”. Previous studies suggested the phenomenon of co-residence over the first 10 years of adulthood was likely to be permanent, and could require a recalibration of expectations and life plans for parents and offspring.
The IFS said the benefits of staying at home were not evenly distributed. Of parents who live with their young adult children, nearly two-thirds own their own home, while 25% are in social housing. Young adults living in London might expect their stay in the parental home to save them about £1,000 a month on rent, compared with the national average of £560 a month, and £340 for young adults in Wales.
