Think about the typical American home. It’s built with key common areas like a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom on the main floor. Upstairs or in a wing down a hallway are the bedrooms.

We know how important those bedrooms are to homebuyers, who often define their search for a new home by how many bedrooms (and bathrooms) it has.

Yet as household sizes have shrunk, the number of bedrooms in new homes has risen.

In 1973, 12% of new homes had one or two bedrooms, 64% had three bedrooms and the remaining 23% had four or more, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Over five decades, the average number of bedrooms has shifted dramatically. In 2023, the number of new homes with one or two bedrooms remained relatively consistent at 11% and the number of three-bedroom homes dropped to 44%. But the number with four bedrooms or more nearly doubled to 45%.

This increase in the number of bedrooms has come as the average household size has declined from 3.01 people in the early 1970s to about 2.5 people today.

On some levels, the appeal of houses with more bedrooms makes sense. Parents may be having fewer children than in the past, but they are more inclined than previous generations to give their children separate bedrooms.

And, unlike a kitchen or living room, a bedroom is super flexible space able to be used as a kid’s bedroom, an exercise space, a game room, a guest room, an office — or perhaps all of those over the course of a decade or two.

Empty rooms

But here’s the thing: The decline in household size and the growth in the number of homes with four or more bedrooms has created what researchers call “excess bedrooms,” which reached an all-time high in 2023.

“In 2023, the number of empty bedrooms nationwide reached 31.9 million, up slightly from 31.3 million in 2022. But back in 1970, the number was a little over 4 million. The share of excess bedrooms among all bedrooms has also ballooned over the decades, from 2.7% in 1970 to 8.8% in 2023,” according to a recent New York Times article by Matt Yan.

It’s important to note that researchers know homeowners typically use at least one bedroom as a home office or storage space, so the excess bedroom stats account for that. They are talking about bedrooms that really don’t have much of a purpose at all, beyond, perhaps, being a little-used guest room.

More creativity needed

Homeowners’ preferences for more bedrooms have been entrenched for more than a decade, with the percentage of new homes with four or more bedrooms hitting 41% in 2012 and staying in the mid-40s ever since.

Major home construction trends shift slowly but if we’re not using most bedrooms as bedrooms — and if the number of “empty” or “excess” bedrooms continues to grow — I wonder if home construction might shift significantly, with architects and builders abandoning wings and floors devoted to bedrooms and incorporating more flexible spaces into other parts of the home.

Until then, interior designers can be of enormous help to homeowners facing wasted space, delving into people’s habits and preferences to find creative, practical ways to reconfigure  bedrooms that will never house a bed.

Cover image from Rottet Collection’s award-winning bed collection.