FHFA House Price Index and Other Official Home Value Data Sources

Every home value you see online rests on a handful of public datasets, and most of them cost nothing. The difference between a number and a cited number is whether you can trace it back to one of them. This guide describes the US sources that matter for a home value and what the portals add on top, then rolls a 2019 Los Angeles purchase forward with the real index. How these sources become a value for one address is the subject of the complete guide to what a house is worth.

A number and a cited number are different products

A cited number answers three questions: which source, which date, which geography. “Homes in your area are up 4 percent” means nothing until you know whether the area is a state, a metro or a ZIP code, whether the 4 percent covers a year or a quarter, and whether it comes from a repeat-sales index, a median of what happened to sell, or a listing-price series. Each of those can move in a different direction in the same month. How these datasets become one valuation is explained separately.

FHFA House Price Index: method, coverage and how to apply it to your home

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's index is a weighted repeat-sales index. It averages the price change between two mortgage transactions (sales or refinancings) on the same single-family house, using loans purchased or securitized by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac since January 1975¹. FHFA describes its estimator as a modified version of the Case-Shiller index using a geometric weighted repeat-sales procedure; because each observation is the same house at two dates, quality differences between houses drop out, which is why FHFA calls it a constant-quality index². Reports come out monthly, with a fuller quarterly report that adds states and metros². The index is not adjusted for inflation; FHFA suggests deflating it with the Consumer Price Index for all items less shelter².

“The FHFA HPI” is a family, and the member you pick changes the answer.

The datasets page carries the 100 largest metropolitan areas, the states (the home price index by state most people are looking for), state nonmetropolitan areas, and then counties, three- and five-digit ZIP codes and census tracts as developmental annual indexes, not seasonally adjusted³. So the answer to “is there a home price index by ZIP code” is yes, with a caveat about sample size in small areas.

Applying the index to your own home

There is an FHFA house price index calculator: it sits on the datasets page. You enter a purchase price, a state or metro area and the quarter you bought, and it projects the price forward with the not seasonally adjusted purchase-only index for the states and the 100 largest metro areas, or the all-transactions index for smaller metros³. Doing the same by hand lets you choose the series. Take the index value for the quarter you bought and the value for the latest quarter in the same series and geography, divide the second by the first, and multiply your purchase price by the result. The product is your home's value had it moved exactly with the average repeat-sale house in that area. Three things neither method knows: what you did to the house since, whether your street outran or lagged the metro, and whether the conforming-mortgage sample resembles your price tier. Treat the result as the number to test against comparable sales you find yourself. The same arithmetic is how to find historical home values for an address between two recorded sales: the last deed gives the price, the index moves it to the date you need.

Freddie Mac's FMHPI and Case-Shiller: what each measures

Freddie Mac's own index, the FMHPI, is calculated monthly and released at the end of the following month for metropolitan statistical areas, states and the nation; every series begins in January 1975, the national index is a weighted average of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., and the input is loans purchased by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, run through a repeat-transactions method⁴. It, too, is nominal⁴, and it serves as a second opinion when the FHFA series revises.

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller home price indices are the third name you will meet: repeat-sales indexes too, built from recorded deeds rather than mortgage files and published for 20 metropolitan areas plus national and composite series. FHFA's FAQ says both employ the same fundamental repeat-valuations approach and points to a 2008 working paper on the differences². For an owner the difference is coverage: 20 metros against every state, hundreds of metros and the ZIP codes³.

Census Bureau and HUD: housing stock, new-home prices and rents

The Census Bureau's New Residential Sales release counts new single-family houses sold and for sale, nationally and by region, with median and average prices and stage of construction, from the Survey of Construction, which HUD partly funds⁵. Its companion, Characteristics of New Housing, reports the 2025 medians: a new single-family home sold for $417,400 (the average was $523,800) and measured 2,194 square feet, and the 131,000 contractor-built homes started that year carried a median contract price of $404,000⁶. They describe new construction, not resales, but they anchor what a replacement house costs. The American Community Survey and the American Housing Survey add owner-reported values, tenure and the characteristics of the existing stock down to the neighborhood.

HUD publishes Fair Market Rents each fiscal year: 40th percentile rents estimated for every metropolitan area (and some HUD-defined subdivisions of them) and every nonmetropolitan county, which set the payment standards for the Housing Choice Voucher program and rent ceilings or initial rents in several other programs⁷. They are the official benchmark under any rent estimate; moving from the FMR to a market rent for one house is the subject of the rent estimate guide. At the top of the pyramid, the Federal Reserve's Z.1 Financial Accounts publish full balance sheets, including net worth, for households and nonprofit organizations every quarter; the 2026:Q2 release appeared on September 11, 2026⁸. It is the number behind every “housing wealth” headline.

County recorder and assessor records: the ground truth of sold prices

Indexes measure movement. Prices come from deeds, and deeds are public, which makes the county recorder the short answer to where to find property sales data. Los Angeles County's Registrar-Recorder puts it plainly: the records are open to anyone, reach back to 1850, and are sold in person, online or by mail; the office keeps no online index⁹. The assessor's portal next door carries the parcel's living area, year built, lot size and last transfer date. Together they are the ground truth that an appraiser, a model and a curious neighbor all start from; the property records guide explains how to read them.

The exception is the non-disclosure states. Redfin's November 2025 overview names Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kansas and Mississippi among the states where sale prices stay out of the public record, with Missouri and Montana varying by county; there the price is shared privately for appraisal and mortgage purposes and reaches buyers through agents with MLS access¹⁰, so an owner who wants comparables needs an agent's sold report or an appraiser.

Risk layers: flood zones, crime statistics and noise maps

Three federal datasets describe the risks around an address rather than its price. FEMA's flood maps place each parcel in a flood zone that drives the National Flood Insurance Program's mandatory-purchase rule and premiums; the FBI's crime data programs publish offenses reported by law-enforcement agencies, from which county-level rates per 100,000 inhabitants are computed; and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics maintains a national noise map that models road and aviation noise. None contains a dollar figure, and each works at its own grain: a parcel, a county, a grid cell. Reading FEMA's map for one address and reading official crime statistics without misusing them each have their own guide.

Portal data: what Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com own and what they repackage

The portals have no private census of home prices. Their inputs are the county records above, feeds from multiple listing services (asking prices, photos, days on market, and sold prices where agents report them), and whatever owners type into the site about renovations and features. The research pages of Realtor.com and Redfin publish downloadable series such as median listing price, days on market and sale-to-list ratios: listing-side statistics, not repeat-sales indexes. So when you ask where Zillow gets its data, the honest answer is: mostly from the same places you can, plus the MLS, plus a model you cannot inspect. How the portal estimators compare on accuracy is tested separately; the guide to market timing and days on market shows how to read the listing-side series.

Rolling a $700,000 Los Angeles purchase from 2019 forward with the FHFA index

The purchase is hypothetical; the index values are real and come from the FHFA datasets page³.

An owner bought a house in the city of Los Angeles in May 2019 for $700,000. The FHFA expanded-data index for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale metropolitan division stood at 295.97 in the second quarter of 2019 and at 454.41 in the second quarter of 2026, not seasonally adjusted³. The all-transactions index for the same division read 364.79 and 557.38 for those quarters³.

Two series built from different samples land within half a percent of each other, the reassuring part. The rest is interpretation: the average repeat-sale house in the metro division rose about 53 percent over seven years, which says nothing about this house. The owner's next step is comparables. Suppose three closed sales of similar homes within half a mile, adjusted for size and condition, indicate $1,030,000 to $1,095,000: the rolled-forward figure sits inside that range, so index and comps agree. Had the comps come in at $950,000, the neighborhood lagged the metro, or the house has a problem the index cannot see. For context, the county's median single-family price in August 2026 was $946,950¹¹; a median describes what happened to sell that month, not this property. FHFA also publishes a relative standard error with each metro value³, a reminder that the index itself is an estimate.

The numbered source list at the end of a CheckValue US report

Every CheckValue report ends with a numbered reference list, and for a United States address several of its entries are the sources in this article. The official price index section draws on the FHFA index for the area¹; the neighborhood context uses Census Bureau data; the flood map is FEMA's, and the crime score from 1 to 10 is computed from FBI county statistics and shown against the national average. The owner of record in the US report (owner type, last sale, mailing city) comes from public county records and carries the Fair Credit Reporting Act notice that it may not be used for credit, employment, insurance or tenant-screening decisions. Each adjustment the model applies is printed with its coefficient and with the source behind that coefficient, so a reader can trace the value back the way this article traces an index.

What the list does not turn the report into is an appraisal. The value is a model's output from those inputs, shown as a point value with a range and without an accuracy percentage; two independent runs and a plausibility check make it reproducible, and the accuracy and method page sets out where the model is strong and where it is thin. To see how the reference list reads in a finished document, open the Los Angeles report among the sample reports.

The EU counterparts in one table

CheckValue reports in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy cite each country's own official sources. No figures are given, because each series has its own base year and definition.

The structure is the same everywhere: an index for the trend, a transaction source for the level, a register for the facts of the parcel, and a statistics office for the context. Only the names change.

Every figure above carries its year and its source. This is general information, not legal or tax advice.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Figures and rules carry the year they were published; check the cited source for the current version.

Josef Eckmair MBA

Co-founder, CheckValue · Managing director, CBDNOL GmbH · More than 20 years in real estate in Tenerife and Austria · Reviewed by Christian Eckmair

Josef Eckmair MBA is co-founder of CheckValue and managing director of CBDNOL GmbH (Ansfelden, Austria). He has more than 20 years of real estate experience in Tenerife and Austria and writes about appraisals, taxes, selling costs and valuations for professionals.

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