The $10,900 Number Hiding in Your Home Budget
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) released survey data from their April 2025 Housing Market Index that puts a hard number on the problem: builders estimate that recent tariff actions are adding an average of $10,900 per home in additional costs. That figure comes directly from builders who are already absorbing the impact across lumber, steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods.
To be clear: this isn't a projected fear. Suppliers have already moved. According to NAHB, the average supplier increased prices by 6.3% in response to announced, enacted, or expected tariffs. More than 60% of builders surveyed said they've already seen higher costs show up in their material orders.
And this number is almost certainly growing. The April survey predates several rounds of additional tariff escalation that have followed since, including new duties on lumber and wood products that took effect in October 2025.
If you're a homeowner, you might be thinking: "That's a builder's problem." It isn't. Every cost that hits a contractor, supplier, or builder eventually lands on the person writing the check. That's you.
Lumber: The Backbone of Every Repair Is Getting Pricier
Let's start with lumber, because wood is in almost every repair a homeowner makes. Deck boards. Subfloor replacement. A fence. Framing for an addition. Structural repairs after water damage. Even window and door installations involve wood.
Canada supplies roughly 85% of U.S. softwood lumber imports, and that relationship has gotten expensive. The Commerce Department increased antidumping and countervailing duties on Canadian lumber from 14.5% to 35%, and then tacked on an additional 10% Section 232 tariff, bringing the total duty on Canadian lumber to 45%.
The problem is that the U.S. simply doesn't produce enough softwood lumber on its own. According to NAHB, U.S. sawmills are currently operating at just 64% of their potential capacity, a figure that has been declining steadily since 2017. Ramping up domestic production takes years. In the meantime, builders and homeowners are paying the premium on imports.
Brookings Institution put the macro picture in stark terms: current tariffs are expected to add roughly $30 billion to the costs of residential construction investment across the country. The majority of that hits new construction, but renovations and maintenance projects are absorbing the rest.
Steel, Aluminum, and the Projects That Hit the Hardest
Steel and aluminum tariffs of 25% took effect in March 2025, and they've sent ripple effects into a long list of common home projects. These aren't obscure materials. They're in roofing panels, gutters, window frames, HVAC systems, appliances, plumbing fixtures, structural framing, and virtually every fastener holding your home together.
For a homeowner considering a roof replacement, the numbers are real. Depending on materials, full roof replacements are now running $1,000 to $4,000 more than they cost in 2023 and 2024. Metal roofing has seen some of the steepest increases, with prices jumping sharply due to steel duties. Even asphalt shingles are more expensive, partly because they use petroleum-based materials and partly because the contractors installing them are paying more for every other material on the job site.
Kitchen and bathroom renovations are similarly affected. The average kitchen remodel now runs around $27,000 nationally, according to HomeAdvisor. Appliances containing steel components or manufactured in countries subject to tariffs have already seen price hikes, and cabinet and vanity tariffs of 25% add another layer on top of that.
HVAC is worth calling out specifically. It's the kind of system homeowners don't think about until it fails, and it typically fails at the worst possible moment. With steel and aluminum costs elevated, HVAC equipment prices have climbed, and that's on top of a labor market where skilled technicians are already expensive and hard to book.
The Material Costs Homeowners Often Overlook
Tariff conversations tend to focus on the big-ticket items. Lumber. Steel. But for homeowners, the cost pressure is actually showing up across a much wider range of materials.
Appliances prices have risen more than twice as fast as overall inflation in 2025, according to the Brookings Institution. Living room, kitchen, and dining room furniture has gone up more than 75% faster than baseline inflation. These aren't renovation-scale purchases. They're the normal replacement cycles every homeowner deals with: a refrigerator that stops cooling, a dishwasher that starts leaking, a washer that won't spin.
Windows are another pressure point. Insulated glass panes and aluminum or vinyl frames both touch materials subject to current tariffs. A homeowner replacing a few windows is looking at a meaningfully higher quote than they would have gotten two years ago.
And then there are plumbing fixtures: faucets, showerheads, valves, and pipe fittings, many of which are manufactured overseas or contain metal components that now carry an import premium. A bathroom renovation that involves replumbing is touching six or seven categories of tariffed goods simultaneously.
Building material costs overall have risen 34% since December 2020, according to NAHB. That number was climbing before this round of tariffs. It's still climbing now.
Why Homeowners Are Delaying Repairs (And Why That Gets Expensive)
Here's where the math starts to hurt in a different way. When repair costs spike, homeowners do what any reasonable person does: they wait. They see if the problem gets worse before committing to the expense. They shop for a lower quote. They defer the project to next season.
According to an Ipsos survey from October 2025, nearly 39% of Americans said they had postponed or skipped necessary home repairs to save money. That's up from just 27% in October 2023. In two years, the share of homeowners deferring maintenance has grown by nearly half.
The problem with deferred maintenance is that it compounds. A small roof leak becomes water damage. A faulty HVAC unit becomes a full replacement. A window with a broken seal becomes mold. The repair that might have cost $800 in March can cost $4,000 by December, and that's before materials get more expensive again.
Sixty percent of homeowners in a U.S. News survey said unexpected repairs are their top concern with their current home. Almost half said they're worried a major repair will hit within the next year. That anxiety is not irrational. It's grounded in real math.
What This Means for Homeowners Who Are Already Feeling Stretched
The conversation about tariffs and home costs tends to stay at the policy level: trade disputes, domestic manufacturing, supply chain resilience. But for a homeowner juggling a mortgage, utilities, insurance, property taxes, and now a spike in every repair estimate they receive, this is a personal budget conversation.
A lot of homeowners are equity-rich but cash-tight. They've watched their home value rise over the past several years, which sounds like good news, but that equity doesn't pay a contractor. It doesn't cover the new water heater. It doesn't replace the garage door or fix the deck boards softening at the edge.
And the irony is real: the rising cost of maintaining a home is hitting the people with the most equity hardest, because they often have the most house to maintain, and the least liquid cash available to do it.
At the same time, the traditional ways of tapping home equity (a home equity loan, a HELOC, a cash-out refinance) all come with the same obstacle. Interest rates are still elevated, lenders have tightened their standards, and adding another monthly payment to an already strained budget is not always a realistic option.
There's a different path worth knowing about. Learn about the sale-leaseback option.
A Different Way to Think About Your Equity Right Now
A sale-leaseback is a financial arrangement where you sell your home to an investor at market value and continue living in it as a renter. You unlock your equity in one transaction, you eliminate the mortgage payment, and you hand off the ongoing financial burden of maintenance, property taxes, and homeowners insurance to the investor who now owns the property. Learn how Sell2Rent's process works.
It's not a loan. There's no new monthly debt payment. It's a clean transaction that converts the equity you've built into liquidity you can actually use, while letting you stay in the home you know and the neighborhood you love. See why homeowners choose Sell2Rent.
For homeowners who are facing a major repair and don't have the cash, who are watching their monthly expenses climb and don't see relief coming, or who have significant equity sitting in their home but can't access it through traditional channels, a sale-leaseback puts that equity to work without forcing a move.
The maintenance burden alone is worth thinking through. As a renter, you're no longer the person calling contractors when the roof leaks or the HVAC unit fails. You're not absorbing the cost of tariff-inflated lumber when the deck needs replacing. Those responsibilities shift. And in an environment where every repair quote is coming in higher than expected, that shift has real dollar value.
You can estimate your equity with Sell2Rent's free home equity calculator to get a sense of what your home qualifies for.
The Cost of Owning Is Going Up. Your Options Don't Have to Narrow.
Tariffs are a policy tool, not a permanent state. Eventually, trade negotiations move, domestic production adjusts, and material costs stabilize. But that timeline is measured in years, not months, and U.S. sawmills operating at 64% capacity aren't going to bridge the lumber gap by summer.
In the meantime, homeowners are absorbing real cost increases on things they have no control over. The question isn't whether repair and maintenance costs are higher. They are. The question is how you position yourself given that reality.
Some homeowners will defer repairs and hope the timing works out. Some will take on debt to cover the gap. Some will sell and move. And some will look at the equity they've built over years and decide that converting it into financial flexibility, while staying in the home they love, is the most sensible move available to them right now.
If you're in that last group, Sell2Rent was built for exactly this moment. Read what other homeowners have said about the process.
You don't have to figure out how to pay for a roof you didn't budget for in a market you didn't ask for. There's another way to look at what you've built. Get your free equity estimate.
Sources: National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Housing Market Index, April 2025. Brookings Institution, "Recent Tariffs Threaten Residential Construction," October 2025. U.S. News & World Report, "Rising Repair Costs Homeowner Survey," June 2025. NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, March and April 2025. CBS News, "Tariffs are pushing remodeling costs up," June 2025. Empower, "Why Home Repairs Could Cost More," November 2025. Ipsos Homeowner Survey, October 2025.
Subscribe to the Real Estate Digest. Weekly newsletter.
