CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Annual spending on improvements and maintenance to owner-occupied homes is expected to gradually slow through 2026, according to the latest Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) from the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. The LIRA projects that year-over-year growth in home renovation and repair spending will be 2.9 percent early this year before easing to 1.6 percent growth by the end of the year.

“Single-family home sales and permitting activity have picked up modestly from very low levels, which should support a nominal increase in remodeling activity this year,” says Rachel Bogardus Drew, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Center. “Even with some deceleration later in the year, overall annual homeowner spending on improvements is expected to reach $522 billion by the end of 2026.”

“Remodeling trends closely track the health of the broader housing market,” says Chris Herbert, managing director of the Center. “If interest rates begin to ease, that could provide a much-needed boost to both housing construction and retail sales of building materials, which for now continue to pose significant headwinds to homeowner improvement spending.” 

According to analysts at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, the methodology was tweaked due to delayed and missing data resulting from the 2025 federal government shutdown and adjustments were made to the January 2026 LIRA methodology. For the October 2025 CPI (BLS), the researchers applied the year-over-year change in the Cleveland Fed’s Revised 16% Trimmed Mean CPI to the October 2024 CPI. For November 2025 new single-family housing starts (Census), they applied the October 2024–2025 rate of change in starts to the November 2024 starts, consistent with their standard imputation method for the final month of each quarter. In addition, they used actual (rather than imputed) December values from the National Association of Realtors for existing single-family home sales and median sales price.