Outdoor hardscape had an almost unbroken run from the end of the Great Recession through 2023. That run is over.
NAHB’s tabulation of the Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction finds that of roughly 940,000 single-family homes started in 2025, 60.5% included a patio. That’s down from 61.8% in 2024 and the lowest share since 59.6% in 2019, and it marks the second straight annual decline.
What a 1.3-point drop actually represents
About 12,000 fewer patios on a year’s worth of starts. Small as a percentage, real as a volume of concrete, pavers and the labor to place them, and it lands on exactly the kind of regional flatwork subcontractor with no ability to hedge.
The likely driver isn’t taste. Builders have been trimming lot sizes and square footage for two years to hold a price point, and a patio is one of the more visible line items to value-engineer out of a spec home when the buyer is qualifying on payment rather than features. NAHB tracks decks and porches separately, and the categories don’t move together.
New England nearly doubled
The regional table held mostly steady, with the top three divisions unchanged: West South Central at 77%, Mountain at 74%, South Atlantic behind them. Warm, dry, spread out. No surprise.
The exception is New England, which jumped from 14% to 26% and vacated the last-place spot it has occupied for years, edging past the Middle Atlantic at 23%. A 12-point move in one division in one year is large enough to be worth treating carefully. It could be a genuine shift in what New England builders are offering, or it could be a composition effect from a thin sample in a division that starts relatively few homes.
Two things to keep straight about the data. The underlying Survey of Construction is a Census probability sample, but this particular cut is NAHB’s, and it covers homes started in 2025 and reported in 2026, so it describes decisions builders made a year or more ago. Whatever they’re specifying for 2026 starts won’t show up until next fall.
The same affordability arithmetic showing up in feature deletions is visible in the geography of where builders are working at all, with single-family construction contracting 13.9% in large metro cores and moving toward cheaper land.