Most of Thursday’s new-home sales release is statistically indistinguishable from nothing happening. One line isn’t.
Census and HUD put August new single-family home sales at 684,000 at a seasonally adjusted annual rate, up 6.4% from July’s 643,000 and the highest point estimate since December 2025. The confidence interval on that 6.4% is plus or minus 19.5 percentage points, which includes zero. Census is saying, in its own notation, that it cannot determine whether sales rose, fell or held.
The year-over-year comparison is the same story: down 2.0%, plus or minus 15.7%.
The number that clears the bar
Average sales price came in at $478,700, against $525,100 in August 2025. That’s down 8.8%, plus or minus 7.7%, and the interval excludes zero. It is the one change in the release that Census’s own statistics call real. In dollars, the average new home sold in August went for $46,400 less than it did a year ago.
Median price tells a softer version: $393,700, up 0.4% from July and down 5.8% year over year from $417,900, with an interval of plus or minus 8.2% on the annual figure.
Average falling harder than median means the drop is concentrated at the top of the distribution. Builders are either selling fewer large houses or discounting them more, and the mix shift is doing part of the work that looks like price reduction.
Inventory didn’t move
There were 483,000 new houses for sale at the end of August, effectively unchanged from July and down 2.0% from a year earlier. Months’ supply fell to 8.5 from 9.0, which is back to exactly where it sat in August 2025.
That’s the context for the price line. Builders are carrying the same inventory they carried a year ago and moving it at a price $46,400 lower. The volume didn’t come from demand recovering. It came from the offer improving.
What not to do with the regional table
The Midwest shows 98,000 in August against 53,000 in July, an 84.9% increase. The regional relative standard error for the Midwest is 17%, against 8% nationally, and the Northeast’s is 33%. Regional monthly moves in this series are close to noise and should not be headlined, which most coverage of this release will do anyway.
Census is explicit in the release that it takes four months to establish a trend for new houses sold, and that preliminary total sales estimates are revised by an average of 6.7%. May, June and July all carry revisions in this release. August is preliminary.
One structural note for anyone modelling off this series: new-home sales are counted at contract signing, not at closing, so the number leads construction activity rather than following it. A real August increase would show up in starts later. Whether there was one, Census won’t say.
Next release is 27 October.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau and HUD, 2026-09-24.