Months of Supply by State: Buyer's Market or Seller's Market

Method, filters, and honest limits

• The formula. Months of supply = active inventory ÷ homes sold in the reporting month. Both inputs are published Redfin market fields for the same region and the same period; we do not smooth them, seasonally adjust them, or blend in anything else. Read it as: at the current sales pace, it would take this many months to clear every listing on the market.
• The bands are not ours, and we are not going to overstate whose they are. The measure itself is published by both the National Association of Realtors, which reports months of inventory with every existing-home-sales release, and Redfin, whose field we use. The specific cut points — under 3 a seller's market, 3 to 6 balanced, over 6 a buyer's market — are the long-standing industry reading of that measure rather than a threshold either organization publishes as a formal definition. So treat them as a convention, not a law of nature: a market at 6.1 months is not categorically different from one at 5.9. We apply the same cut points everywhere on this site rather than inventing a proprietary score.
• Inventory vs long-run average. That column is (current active inventory − the region's 60-month average active inventory) ÷ that average, computed from the same 60-month trend series the charts on our region pages draw. It answers a different question than the level does. Some markets always carry a deep listing pool and some always run thin, so the useful signal is whether today's count is unusual for that market, not whether it is large in absolute terms. Reventure publishes a metric under the name Inventory Surplus / Deficit; ours is on this page for free with the arithmetic printed, and the side-by-side comparison lays out what each one is.
• The county filter, stated plainly. Counties are ranked only if they report May 31, 2026 and sold at least 100 homes that month; 223 counties on an older reporting month and 2,208 counties below the volume bar are excluded. Without it, the list is led by Midland County, Texas at 370 months on 2 sales and Ector County, Texas at 157 months on 3 sales and Howard County, Texas at 156 months on 1 sale. A county with a couple of closings in a month produces an enormous ratio that means nothing about buyer leverage. With the filter, the maximum falls to 12.1 months and the median to 3.0.
• County reporting months are not uniform, and this matters. 2,850 of the 3,073 counties we track report May 31, 2026. The rest lag, some as far back as September 30, 2020. Any county ranking that does not filter on the reporting date is quietly comparing 2026 data to figures that are years old, in the same sorted table. Ours filters, and the excluded count is printed above so you can check the arithmetic.
• Coverage. Months of supply is present for all 51 state-level rows and for 3,018 of the 3,073 counties in our data. The District of Columbia is included in the state table because Redfin publishes it as a state-level region; it is labeled by its real name rather than the "Columbia" slug our files use. 50 genuine states plus DC makes 51 rows. DC reads 4.8 months.
• There is no city table, on purpose. The underlying public data does not publish months of supply at city grain. We could divide city inventory by city homes sold and print a number, but a derived estimate ranked head-to-head against reported figures is the kind of thing that looks authoritative and isn't. If that changes upstream, the table appears.
• What this number does not tell you. Supply is a leverage indicator, not a price forecast. A market can sit at 7 months and hold its prices, and a market at 2 months can still see cuts if listings are mispriced. For the price side, see where sellers are cutting and listing velocity decay; for valuation, price-to-income and price-to-rent; for what is coming online next year, the permit pipeline; for downside risk specifically, the crash-risk methodology.
• What is a good months of supply? There is no single good number, but there is a standard reading. Under 3 months of supply is a seller's market, 3 to 6 months is balanced, and above 6 months is a buyer's market. Those cut points are the long-standing industry convention around the months-of-inventory measure that NAR and Redfin both publish, not a threshold either one defines formally, and they are the same bands we use on every market page on this site.
• Is it a buyer's market or a seller's market in 2026? At the state level, mostly neither. As of May 31, 2026, 22 of the 51 state-level rows are under 3 months of supply, 28 are in the balanced 3-to-6 band, and 1 is above 6 months: Hawaii at 7.0. The median state sits at 3.2 months. Counties are more spread out: of the 642 counties with enough sales volume to rank, 29 are above 6 months and 310 are under 3.
• How is months of supply calculated? Active inventory divided by homes sold in the same month. Both numbers come straight from Redfin's published market data — the inventory count and the homes-sold count for that region and reporting period — with no smoothing or seasonal adjustment applied by us. The result is read as "at the current pace of sales, it would take this many months to sell every listing on the market."
• Do you have months of supply by city? No. The public data we consume does not publish months of supply at city grain, and we are not going to estimate it and then rank cities against each other as if it were reported. State and county are the finest grains where the field actually exists, so those are the only two tables here.
• Data as of May 31, 2026 — that is the Redfin reporting month the figures describe. Our pipeline last rebuilt these files on July 30, 2026, which is a different date and is not what the market numbers measure. Related: price forecast by state, county distress pressure, HomeStats vs Reventure, every source we use.

Sources: Redfin Data Center (inventory, homes sold, new listings, months of supply, reporting month), by way of our own build. The 3-and-6-month cut points are the common industry reading rather than a threshold either NAR or Redfin publishes as a definition. Every state figure on this page is in the free JSON API at /api/states/{slug}.json, and county months of supply at /api/states/{slug}/places.json — no key, no signup (docs). The summary /api/states/index.json carries the inventory-vs-long-run-average column but not the months-of-supply fields.