State of Shared Living 2026
We asked the UK about shared living and got over 6,000 responses. Filter the numbers and see it for yourself.
“Shared houses are home to millions of UK renters. Everyone has an opinion about them. Almost nobody asks the people who live there.”
So we asked. This is the second year of COHO's State of Shared Living survey, now the UK's largest study of shared living, and nearly 7,000 responses came back. Some respondents have shared for over a decade. Others have never shared at all, and told us exactly why not.
The timing matters. The Renters' Rights Act came into force in May, the biggest rewrite of renting in a generation, and this report carries the first data on how its rules are landing in shared homes.
The clearest movement is age. Sharers aged 30 or over jumped from 32.4% to 40% in twelve months, and the share who would recommend shared living edged up alongside it, from 56.7% to 61.0%.
One number did not move at all: the 1 in 5 sharers who have felt unsafe because of a housemate. You will find it in this report, given the same prominence as everything else. We publish what the data says, including the parts our own industry will find uncomfortable.
Shared living has grown up. The conversation about it should grow up too. Here is a start.
A snapshot of shared living right now
6,387 UK renters, of whom 5,145 currently share. Surveyed 7 May to 31 July 2026.
Filter the findings to the market you actually work in
Every headline figure here is a national average, and averages hide the thing you need. Filter the full dataset by age, gender, city and how long someone has lived in their house. If you manage houses in Liverpool, or let mainly to over-35s, that view is a few clicks away.
Explore the dataTwelve chapters, one year of shared living
The full report is below, in the order it was written. You can also download it as a PDF.
Who shares now
House shares are still talked about as a young person's stopgap. The people living in them are older than that, and older than the trend showed last year.
Older than the stereotype
5,145 current house sharers answered this survey. 2 in 5 of them are 30 or over. Nearly 1 in 10 is over 45. The student-house image survives mostly in the heads of people who have never actually lived in one.
The largest single age group is still 18 to 24, at 33.5%. But the balance has shifted. 26.5% are in their late twenties, 16.4% are in their early thirties, and 14.3% are between 35 and 44. Sharers aged 45 and over now make up 9.3% of everyone in a shared house, a group the market barely acknowledges.
The written answers explain how people get here. Divorce and separation come up again and again. So do relocating for work, and saving for a deposit. When life changes suddenly, a shared house is often the housing that responds.
of current sharers are aged 30 or over. Among sharers who aren't students, it's 48.4%. That's up from 32.4% in 2025, the fastest-moving number in this report.
Where they are
Respondents named 35 towns and cities. London leads with 1,065 current sharers, followed by Liverpool (612), Manchester (469), Birmingham (266) and Nottingham (236). Beyond the big five, shared living shows up everywhere from Oxford and Bristol to Leeds, Cambridge, Plymouth and Southampton.
The make-up of a house share changes with the city. Oxford and London lean professional, with half of sharers aged 30 or over, while Liverpool and Bristol lean young, closer to a quarter in that age group. Appetite for better housemate matching follows the younger cities: willingness to pay for compatibility reaches 49% in Liverpool and 47.3% in Leeds, against 35% in London.
Full houses
58% of sharers live with 5 or more other people, and only 8.8% share with just one or two. Most sharers end up in the bigger houses, even if smaller ones are more common.
What matters is that the big house holds up. Feeling safe doesn't fall as households grow. 79.3% feel safe in a house of 6 or more, against 83.1% in a house of two. Peacefulness holds too, at around 70% in the largest homes. The one thing that softens with size is closeness: in smaller houses 63% count their housemates as friends, compared with 49% in the biggest ones. Scale costs a little intimacy, not safety.
A workforce, mostly
Sharers split almost evenly by gender, roughly 50% male and 48% female. Employment tells the clearer story. 63.1% work full-time, 7.9% part-time, 3.6% are self-employed and 19.2% are students. Only about 5% are outside work or study altogether.
That last figure is the one worth sitting with. The image of the unemployed HMO tenant assumes a house full of people on benefits. Among the sharers we surveyed, that isn't what shows up. These are working renters in privately managed house shares, and among sharers aged 30 or over, 89% are in paid work.
The people living in Britain's house shares are older than the stereotype suggests, and the large majority are in work. Most live in sizeable households that function well, in every part of the country. Shared living has become a settled national norm rather than a stopgap.
Why people share
Most sharers arrived for practical reasons. What they found once they moved in is a warmer story.
Affordability opens the door
Ask sharers why they moved in and the most common answer is practical. For 47.9%, a shared house was the only affordable option in the area they needed to live. That points to what shared living does better than the rest of the housing market: it puts a decent home within reach of an ordinary salary, in a place people actually want to be.
The write-ins tell the sharpest story. People wrote about divorce and separation. Others about a job in a new city, or covid ending a household that had worked for years. 16 simply wrote that they were homeless. When life changes at two weeks' notice, a shared house is the part of the market that can respond, and for some of the people here it was the housing that caught them.
agree they chose shared living and it wasn't a last resort.
What they value once they're in
Sharers were asked what they value most, and could pick more than one answer. Cost wins, as it was always going to, named by 48%. The quieter result is what sits second. Second place doesn't go to location or convenience, it goes to the people: 39% value having others around. The saving is real, with 67% saying shared living has saved them money.
Then the number that matters most: 57% would choose a shared house again, now they've lived it rather than imagined it.
Age changes the answer completely. For under-25s, the social side is the top thing they value, with 58% naming having people around, ahead of any other answer including cost. That flips with age. For the mid-40s and above, only 22% say the social side matters most, and cost takes over.
"I never imagined that in my 40s I'd be living in a shared house. Life doesn't always go to plan. It helped me through a time when I needed an affordable place while rebuilding my life. It's reminded me it's never too late to start over."
Most people arrive at a shared house for the price, and nearly half say it was the only affordable option open to them. What holds them there is something else. A majority say it wasn't a last resort, and most would choose it again once they've lived it. For the youngest sharers, the company is named more often than the cost. People arrive for the rent and stay for the people.
Life inside
Most sharers rate the experience as good, and better than they expected. The full picture, including the one number that should worry the industry, is below.
Better than expected, most of the time
Most people move into a shared house braced for the worst. The stories that travel are the passive-aggressive fridge notes and the housemate who never does the washing up, so expectations going in tend to be low. That's what makes the headline result quietly striking.
64.9% rate their experience as good. More striking is that 59% say it turned out better than they expected. People walk in expecting little and come away pleasantly surprised, which tells you the reputation is worse than the reality.
Attitudes are shifting too. 75.6% of sharers now say they're comfortable telling people how they live. Among those who have never shared, only 1 in 10 say they'd feel embarrassed to. That second figure is the telling one. It's the people furthest from shared living, the ones most likely to carry the old assumptions, saying the stigma no longer holds. 50.1% agree that shared houses get an unfair bad reputation, a quiet objection from people who know their own homes better than the headlines do.
The social side is where the report has to be honest. Shared living promises company. The reality is less certain. 48% say they've made real friends through shared living. 51% count their housemates as friends rather than people they happen to share a kitchen with. 44.5% say their mental health has benefited from living alongside others.
These are close to coin-flip numbers, and they're worth sitting with rather than dressing up. For every house where the kitchen chat runs past midnight, there's one where six people pass on the stairs and little else. The company shared living offers is real, but it isn't guaranteed. It comes down almost entirely to who's in the house, which is the thread running through everything sharers told us.
The social side is the part of shared living that landlords and agents can most directly shape, and this survey points to how. The first thing is information: 42.3% of sharers moved in without knowing who they'd be living with, and telling people who's already in the house is about the easiest improvement a landlord can make. The second is matching: 40.2% would pay more rent to live with housemates who suit them, so the demand for compatibility is clearly there, even if few landlords currently meet it. The third is involvement: 52.5% want a say in who moves in, and the people already in the house tend to know better than anyone who will fit, and who will stay.
The number that refuses to move
One finding in this survey demands more attention than any other. 21.3% of current sharers have at some point felt unsafe because of another housemate. 1 in 10 feel it strongly. Last year the figure was 21.4%. A year on, it hasn't moved.
The rest of the safety picture is reassuring, which is exactly why this number stands out. 79.8% feel safe in their house, and 47.2% feel completely safe. 73.0% call their house peaceful, and 55.7% say falling out with housemates is rare. Shared houses aren't the chaos their reputation suggests. That is what makes the unsafe figure so hard to set aside.
Women and men report it at the same rate, 20.9% against 21.6%. The risk isn't about who you are, it's about who you're placed with. Tenants feeling unsafe in their own home, even once, is not something a sector can ignore. The cause points somewhere specific: who gets to move in, and how much say the people already there have.
have felt unsafe because of a housemate, unchanged from 2025.
"I've had housemates actively threatened and pressured by other housemates, with no intervention from the landlord..."
"I wish they did proper checks on the housemates. Ones I've lived with before were dangerous..."
The shine wears off
How people feel about a shared house changes over time, and not in the way you'd expect. It doesn't get steadily worse. It peaks near the end of the first year, then fades.
The first few months are about settling in. The high point comes at 6 to 12 months, when 58% call their housemates friends, more than at any other stage. After that it slips. By 1 to 2 years, it's 48%. By 3 years or more, it's down to 43%, and people rate their overall experience lower than any other group.
Why does it fade? Partly because early friendships don't always last. Housemates move on, and the new ones are strangers again. And the people who stay longest are often those with the fewest options, keeping an affordable room rather than a house they love.
Most of a landlord's attention lands in the first month, on the viewing, the paperwork and the welcome. That effort's well spent, but it can't be the only effort. Where it slips is the second year, and that's the part worth caring about. 34.0% of sharers have been in their current house for over a year, and 12.1% for more than 3 years. 40.9% have no plans to move at all. The dip lands on the settled tenants a landlord most wants to keep.
A brief check-in around the 12 to 18 month mark, a bit of thought about who fills a room when someone leaves rather than taking the first application, and a shared space that people actually want to use, all help the good years run longer. None of it is expensive. It's mostly a matter of noticing that a house needs looking after well past move-in day.
Life inside a shared house is mostly positive, and often more positive than the people living in one expected. The social side is less certain, and it tends to fade in the second year rather than the first. The one figure that won't move is safety: 1 in 5 have felt unsafe because of a housemate, the same as last year. Running through all of it is a single variable, which is who ends up sharing the house.
The housemate lottery
Tenants say housemates matter more to their happiness than the landlord or agent does. Almost nothing in the letting process acknowledges that.
The people matter more than the property
There's a strange gap at the heart of how shared houses are let. The people you live with shape the experience more than almost anything else, yet they're the one thing the letting process barely tells you about. Sharers know this: 61.5% say their housemates matter more to their happiness than their landlord or agent does. And yet 42.3% of current sharers had no information at all about who they'd be sharing with before they moved in.
This isn't a hangover from older tenancies. The people who moved in most recently are just as much in the dark, which says the gap is still there in how shared houses are let today.
The result is a quiet, common regret. More sharers wish they'd known about their housemates than about anything else, 59.6%, and twice the share who wanted more about the landlord or agent. Looking ahead, 52.5% want more say in who moves in next.
of sharers had no information about who they'd be living with before they moved in.
Compatibility has a price, and tenants will pay it
Tenants will pay to live with people who suit them. 40.2% say they'd accept higher rent for compatible housemates, and 8.1% would pay significantly more, 10% or more above their budget. Most operators sell on en-suites and bills, while the thing tenants would actually pay more for, who they live with, is rarely on offer.
The appetite is strongest among the young. 52% of under-25s would pay more for compatible housemates, more than double the 24% among sharers aged 45 to 54. It's the same group that values the social side most, now saying they'd put money behind it.
What does compatible mean? It's not a fixed list of traits. A similar age matters to some, a similar lifestyle to others, each named by around 30%. 36% of sharers name no particular trait at all. For them, compatibility is simpler than a checklist, it just means someone easy to live with. That's harder to match on a form, and easier to judge with a bit of care. One specific need stands out: 16% ask for neurodiversity awareness, which the lettings industry has barely begun to meet.
One decision shapes everything after it
This chapter and the last describe the same problem from two sides. 1 in 5 sharers has felt unsafe because of a housemate. 2 in 5 moved in knowing nothing about the people they'd be living with. Half would like a say in who arrives next. All of it comes down to a single decision that shapes everything after it: who gets offered the room. It's the one moment where the landlord holds the leverage and the tenant almost none, and too often it comes down to little more than who applied first.
That's understandable. An empty room is lost rent, and the pressure to fill it quickly is real. But the wrong tenant is far more expensive than a slow one, and a bad match tends to cost you the good tenants around it. The care taken at that point is what can protect every other room in the house.
The thing that most shapes life in a shared house is who else lives there, and it's the part of letting that gets the least attention. Most sharers moved in knowing little about their housemates, yet compatibility is what they say matters most, and what many would pay extra to get. The demand is real and the bar is modest. What tenants want is someone easy to live with, not a ready-made friend group.
What tenants want
We gave sharers sixteen features and five picks each. The results tell operators exactly what to build, and what a room really costs in 2026.
Fast, reliable WiFi is the new hot water
When sharers list what they most want in a home, two things sit clear at the top. Bills included in the rent and fast, reliable internet finished level, a fraction of a point apart. Both are now expected as standard rather than treated as extras.
What tenants ask for is mostly the absence of friction. Predictable bills, with no surprise at the end of the month. Internet that works when they need it. Space to keep their things, and communal areas that stay clean without anyone having to nag.
The one genuine premium in the top tier is an en-suite, wanted by 60%. Most sharers live with 5 or more people, and the shared bathroom is where patience wears thinnest.
Base: 5,121 current sharers who answered. Five picks each, so figures don't total 100%.
These preferences carry real weight. 68% of sharers have turned down a room because a feature was missing, and 56.3% would pay more rent for a house that has their must-haves. For a landlord, these features attract tenants, and tenants will pay for them.
of sharers have turned down a room because a feature was missing.
What a room costs
Most sharers pay between £401 and £800 a month for a room. 74% fall in that range, and the most common rent is £601 to £800, paid by 41.8%. Very few sit at the extremes. Only 6% pay more than £1,000, and just 2.4% pay under £400, a cheaper end of the market that has all but gone.
The bigger point is how little a room varies by location. The cost of a whole property moves sharply from one city to the next. A room doesn't. Liverpool and Leeds sit at the lower end, Oxford and London at the higher, but the gap between them is far smaller than it would be for a flat of your own in those same places.
London is the exception worth naming. There, 18% of sharers pay more than £1,000 for their room, against 1.5% in Manchester. So a room in the capital genuinely does cost more. Even so, 46% of London sharers pay £800 or less, and more than 80% pay £1,000 or less. Renting alone in the same city would cost far more than either.
What people pay tracks what they earn, though only loosely. Among sharers earning under £15,000, 13% pay more than £800 for their room. Among those earning over £50,000, that rises to 46%. Higher earners take better rooms. But even at the top, more than half still pay £800 or less. Rent moves with income, just far less steeply, and that is a large part of why a room stays within reach across the income scale.
What tenants want from a shared house is straightforward, and mostly about removing friction rather than adding luxury. Bills included and reliable internet sit at the top, both now expected as standard. The en-suite is the one real premium. On cost, the picture is reassuringly flat. Room rents move far less from city to city than whole properties do, which is much of the reason shared living keeps expensive places within reach.
Landlord or agent?
Tenants with a direct landlord report a better experience on every measure we asked about. The gap says more about scale than intent.
The management gap
In this survey, 55.5% of sharers say their home is managed by an agent and 22.2% directly by a landlord. Another 17.4% don't know which they have, and the remaining few ticked both.
The survey asked tenants to rate their landlord or agent on six things. Tenants with a direct landlord scored higher on all six.
Agents come closest to landlords on the practical things. 64.9% of agent-managed tenants say their manager communicates clearly, against 72.2% for landlords. 71.8% feel comfortable raising an issue, against 78.3%. The wider gaps are about the person. 59.4% of agent-managed tenants think their manager cares about the property, against 73.8% of landlord-managed ones. On caring about the tenants it's 55.6% against 69.4%. On trust, 60.4% against 72.8%.
Base: 1,134 landlord-managed and 2,835 agent-managed current sharers. Figures show the share agreeing, scoring 2 or 3 out of 3. Bars are drawn from zero.
The strongest answers show it best. 47.2% of landlord-managed tenants gave the top mark for caring about the property. For agent-managed tenants it was 31.9%. The same gap shows up in what tenants say about their home: 64.2% of landlord-managed tenants would recommend it, against 57.7% of agent-managed ones.
Where the gap comes from
Agents and landlords in this survey run much the same houses. 29% of agent-managed sharers live with 6 or more people, against 26% of landlord-managed ones. So the gap isn't explained by the kind of property each one looks after.
It isn't the size of the household either. We looked for the gap inside every age band, every length of tenancy, students against everyone else, and houses from 2 sharers up to 6 or more. It runs the same way every time, and in houses of 2 it's widest of all, at 22 points on whether anyone cares about the tenants.
The difference sits with the manager, not the house. A landlord has one set of tenants to know. An agent has far more and no way to know them all as well.
72% are comfortable raising an issue with their agent, close to the 78% landlords manage. The problem is what happens after they do. Only 61% say maintenance is dealt with in a reasonable time, against 72% for landlords. Agents are good at hearing about the problem but slower at fixing it.
That's also where the trust and care scores come from. A tenant who reports a problem and hears nothing back thinks nobody cares. Agents also tell tenants less about who they'll be sharing with: 45% of agent-managed tenants moved in with no information about their housemates, against 38% of those with a landlord. It's the cheapest gap in this chapter to close.
Landlords are furthest ahead of agents on the things tenants value most. 74% of their tenants say they care about the property and 73% trust them. That comes from being known to the people in the house, and it's worth protecting.
The clearest gain left is in who joins the house. 38% of landlord-managed tenants moved in with no information about their housemates. 52.5% of sharers want a say in who moves in next, and 40.2% would pay more rent to live with people who suit them. The tenants already living there usually know who will fit, and asking them costs a conversation.
Tenants with a direct landlord rate their management higher on all six measures we asked about. Agents come closest on the things a process handles, being reachable and easy to approach, and fall furthest behind on trust and on whether anyone seems to care. The likeliest explanation is how many tenants sit behind a single manager. What tenants ask for in return is specific and small: repairs that get closed rather than logged, and knowing who they'll be living with before they move in.
Staying and leaving
Sharers move between houses far more often than they leave shared living. Most of what would make them stay is in the manager's hands.
A market in constant motion
66% of sharers have lived in their current house for less than a year, and 24.9% expect to be gone within 3 months. Rooms turn over fast, and every turn is a void for somebody.
They rarely leave shared living itself. Among sharers planning a move, 35.2% are going straight into another house share, 22.8% plan to rent alone and 8.8% expect to buy. The tenant one operator loses is usually the tenant another one gains.
Past sharers show where the exits come from. 33.7% left their last shared house because their circumstances changed, 20.5% wanted to live alone and 17.1% moved in with a partner. No operator prevents any of that. But two reasons are preventable: 8.8% left over a bad experience with housemates and 3.4% over the landlord or agent. Roughly 1 exit in 8 was within management's control.
of sharers planning to move are going straight into another house share.
The retention playbook, written by tenants
We asked current sharers what would make them stay in their house longer. Lower rent leads, as it always will. A quarter said nothing, they're happy as they are. Everything else on the list is operational.
Base: 4,954 current sharers. More than one answer could be chosen, so the figures don't total 100%.
Set rent aside and a short list remains. 27% want maintenance resolved faster. 18.4% want better communication from their landlord or agent. 15.9% want a say in who moves in next, which is the demand that ran through chapter four, where 40.2% said they would pay more rent to live with people who suit them.
The tenants who have stayed longest are the ones with most at stake. 68% of sharers in their first 6 months rate the experience good, and after 3 years it's 54%. They're also the group most likely to want a say in who moves in next, rising from 13.9% in the first six months to 22.7% after three years. The longer someone lives in a house, the more they care who joins it.
"Shared living is never going to be perfect, I do however feel like the estate agents could vet their tenants more thoroughly, potentially putting it to the existing housemates before confirming new tenants."
Shared houses turn over fast. Almost all of that movement stays inside shared living, so the tenant one operator loses is usually the tenant another one gains. Most exits are life stages nobody can prevent, but roughly 1 in 8 was within management's control. Asked what would keep them longer, tenants name rent first and then three things an operator decides: repairs resolved faster, better communication, and a say in who moves in next.
Shared living vs the stereotypes
People speak confidently about shared houses without ever having lived in one. We asked 572 of them what they believe, and 5,145 sharers what it's actually like.
They're full of unemployed people
sharer unemployment, against a 4.9% UK rate
94.6% of current sharers are working or studying, and 63.1% work full-time. Measured the way the ONS measures it, unemployment among sharers is 3.8%, against a UK rate of 4.9% (ONS, March to May 2026).
They're for young people and students
of sharers are students
40% of sharers are 30 or over, and 9.3% are 45 or over. Students are 19.2% of the total. Among people who have never shared, 22.6% still believe shared living is for students and young people.
They're chaotic and unsafe
call their house peaceful
23.3% of people who have never shared expect noise and chaos, and 13.9% expect shared houses to be unsafe. The people living in them report otherwise: 73% call their house a peaceful place to live and 79.8% feel safe in it.
They're bad for the area
say their house is a positive presence
64% of sharers say their house is a positive presence in the area it sits in, and 50.1% think shared houses carry an unfair bad reputation. 73.5% of them earn under £35,000, and almost all are working or studying.
5,145 current sharers, and 572 people who have never lived in a shared house.
Pets and the Renters' Rights Act
The Renters' Rights Act arrived on 1 May 2026 promising tenants a fairer hearing on pets. Here is the first data from shared housing.
Pets and the right to ask
The Renters' Rights Act gave tenants the right to request a pet from 1 May 2026, and landlords a duty not to refuse without good reason. This survey opened 6 days later, so it's the first look at how that right is landing in shared houses.
Almost nobody has used it. 2.4% of sharers have had a pet request turned down since the Act came in, and 4.6% live in a house with a pet, most often a cat.
That reads like a rule working, until you look at who wanted one. 24.5% of sharers say they would be more likely to choose a house that allowed pets. 26.6% say their landlord or agent doesn't allow them, and named it as something that shaped their search.
would be more likely to choose a house that allowed pets, while only 4.6% live in one that does.
The demand isn't universal. 38.3% of sharers don't have or want a pet, and another 37.2% say a pet-friendly house would make no difference to them. Age barely moves any of it. What's left is a clear quarter of the market that is currently unserved, and 11.8% of sharers say pets played a part in choosing their current house, with 5.5% calling it a major factor. Among houses that do allow them, cats lead at 36% and dogs at 21%.
Where a request has been turned down since May, it was more often by a direct landlord than by an agent, 3.4% against 1.7%. The numbers behind those percentages are small, so they're a signal rather than a verdict, but the direction is worth noting. The manager closest to the property is the one most likely to say no.
"I found the process of bringing a pet with me to be quite easy. Open communication with the other tenants, agent and landlord allowed a smooth transition. With my pet being quite friendly, he helped ease any potential worries and now seems to be a welcome addition to the place!"
5,112 current sharers who answered the pet questions.
The people who've never shared
572 respondents have never lived in a shared house. Their reasons are more practical, and less hostile, than the industry assumes.
The people who haven't shared yet
572 people in this survey have never lived in a shared house. We asked them why, and what would change their mind.
Very few had rejected the idea. 1 in 10 said they actively chose against it. The most common answer, from 4 in 10, was that they lived with family instead, and others moved in with a partner or could afford to rent alone. For most of this group, shared living was never a decision they had to make. 14.9% now say they wish they had considered it earlier.
Cost is starting to force the question. 59.5% say the price of renting alone has made them reconsider, and half of those have thought about it seriously. That doesn't mean they will move into a house share. It means the question is open for a group that never had to ask it.
of people who have never shared would consider it if they were matched with compatible housemates in advance. Only 19.9% would rule it out entirely.
The under-25s are closest to considering it
Openness to shared living falls with age. Among people who have never shared, 74.4% of 18 to 24 year olds say cost has made them reconsider. Among 35 to 44 year olds it's 27.1%.
The same gap shows up in what would persuade them. 91.9% of under-25s would consider sharing if they were matched with compatible housemates in advance, against 62.8% of 45 to 54 year olds. The people most open to shared living are the ones who haven't started yet.
What would change their mind
Two things came back clearly. The first is knowing who they would live with, named by 49.4%. The second is the house itself: 54% name sharing a bathroom as something that would put them off, and 48.8% name a lack of privacy.
The people who have never shared are not a lost audience. What stops them is specific: 54% name sharing a bathroom and 49.4% name not knowing who they would be living with. An en-suite answers the first. Telling applicants who is already in the house answers the second. Both are decisions made when a house is specified and let, not attitudes that need changing.
One caution
The people who have left shared living are its least enthusiastic advocates. 48.3% of past sharers rate their experience good, against 64.9% of current sharers, and 53.6% would recommend it against 61%. Those questions were asked in the past tense of a different group, so some of the gap is memory rather than decline. It is still the sector's own alumni giving it the lowest marks in this survey.
The people who have never shared are not opposed to it. Most simply never had to consider it. Cost is now putting the question in front of them, and it lands hardest on the young. What would move them is not a discount but certainty. 8 in 10 would consider sharing if they knew their housemates suited them, and the practical objections that remain, the bathroom and the loss of privacy, are the same things the better end of the market already solves.
Year on year
Last year this survey could describe shared living. With a second wave it can measure movement.
The year the market aged
32.4% of sharers were 30 or over last year. This year it is 40.0%. The change came from across the age range rather than one group. The two youngest bands shrank and all three bands above 30 grew.
It shows up city by city too. Sharers aged 30 or over went from 32.6% to 49.7% in London, 32.0% to 50.2% in Oxford, 24.8% to 36.4% in Nottingham and 31.8% to 42.1% in Birmingham. Seven of the eight cities large enough to compare moved this way. Leeds is the exception, falling from 45.6% to 40.1%.
Older sharers want a different house. 70% of sharers aged 35 to 44 name an en-suite in their top five features, against 46.5% of under-25s, and professional cleaning of communal areas divides the market more sharply than any other feature.
of all sharers are 30 or over. Last year it was 32.4%.
Base: 4,061 current sharers in 2025, 5,145 in 2026. 2025 ages were collected as a number and banded to match 2026. Bars are drawn to a 50% scale.
Fewer are in their first months
Last year 49.9% of sharers had lived in their house for less than 6 months. This year it is 29.2%. Most of that moved one band along rather than into long tenancies. The 6 to 12 month group nearly doubled, from 19.8% to 36.8%, while the share who have been in their house more than a year rose from 30.3% to 34.0%. 66% of sharers are still inside their first year.
Fewer expect a place of their own
Among sharers planning a move, another shared house is where most expect to go, up from 33.9% to 35.2%. It is the only destination that grew. Renting alone fell furthest, from 27.8% to 22.8%. Renting with a partner went from 16.9% to 14.2% and moving in with family from 11.5% to 10.1%. Buying alone slipped from 6.5% to 5.4%, while buying with a partner held at 3.4%.
2026 offered "move in with friends" as an answer and 2025 did not. It took 8.9% this year, so every other 2026 figure sits a little lower than it otherwise would. The movement worth reading is that a shared house gained ground while renting alone lost it.
The market aged sharply in twelve months, in almost every city large enough to measure. Tenancies settled a little. And the destination people expect next moved towards another shared house rather than a place of their own.
Voices
1,504 sharers wrote to us. Their words, corrected only for spelling, deserve a chapter without our commentary.
"I never imagined that in my 40s I'd be living in a shared house. Like many people, I thought this stage of life would look very different. But life doesn't always go to plan."
"When the right housemates move in, the whole experience becomes a million times better. Living with people you get along with makes it more enjoyable and creates a real sense of home."
"Took a risk at moving into a house where I knew nobody, but took the time to get to know people on a deeper more personal level. Enjoyed getting to know them and now have a really nice friendship with them."
"My housemate was celebrating Holi and shared some of the traditional foods with me and invited me to join the celebration."
"I came from the Philippines, currently I'm living in a multicultural household... being a cook and having food as my love language, I love it when my housemates share their food and techniques on how to cook it. Likewise as I love sharing Filipino dishes."
"Me and a couple of flatmates got drunk in the kitchen and ended up chatting for like four hours and it felt like nothing."
"In the summer all housemates get together and sit in the back garden, have a drink and play games until the early hours of the morning. It's very fun."
"Shared living has taught me resilience, patience, and how to adapt to different people and situations. It has its challenges, lack of privacy, different lifestyles, and learning to compromise, but it has also helped me through a time when I needed an affordable place to live while rebuilding my life."
We asked 6,387 of them.
Everyone has an opinion about HMOs. Councils license them, neighbours object to them, headlines describe them as overcrowded and badly run. Almost none of that comes from the people living inside, and almost nobody asks them.
64.9% rate their experience good. 94.6% are working or studying. 73.0% call their home peaceful. And among people who have never shared a house, only 1 in 10 say they would be embarrassed to. The reputation describes a version of shared living that only a very small minority now live in.
Read the written answers and it goes further than statistics. People wrote to us about divorce, bereavement, leaving an abusive relationship, arriving in a new country, and starting over at 50. A shared house caught them. This is the part of the housing market that absorbs what the rest of it can't, and it does that without credit.
That's what shared living gets right. This is where it still needs to improve. 21.3% of sharers have felt unsafe because of a housemate. Last year it was 21.4%. Almost everything else in this report moved over 12 months. That one did not, and it will not, until who gets offered a room is treated as carefully as who gets offered a tenancy.
Shared living has grown up. 2 in 5 sharers are 30 or over, and almost half the non-student market is. They deserve houses designed for the people actually in them, and a say in who they live with.
The survey runs again in 2027. Same months, same questions, so next year we can show you what changed. To everyone who answered, and to the 1,504 of you who wrote to us about your home, thank you.
Take the whole thing with you
The designed report, all twelve chapters, every chart with its base, and the full methodology. No form, no email address, no waiting.
Download the PDFEvery figure in this report is free to use with credit to COHO's State of Shared Living 2026. Every chart carries its base, and the methodology below shows how we calculated things, so you can check us.
How this was done, so you can check us
The survey
The State of Shared Living 2026 ran online from 7 May to 31 July 2026. It was promoted through COHO's own channels, including in-app prompts, the COHO website, email, and shares from tenants and landlords. It was also promoted by two micro-influencers on Instagram and TikTok, and through Native to students at Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Salford.
Respondents were not paid. Entry to a prize draw was optional and held separately from the survey answers.
Who answered
6,713 responses were received. Repeat email addresses were removed, keeping the first submission from each address, which leaves 6,387 people. Every figure in this report is calculated on the deduplicated base of 6,387 unless stated otherwise. Those 6,387 divide into three groups, and most questions were asked of only one of them:
- 5,145 currently live in a shared house
- 670 have lived in one but don't now
- 572 have never lived in one
Chapters 1 to 7 and Chapter 9 draw on current sharers. Chapter 8 compares people who have never shared with current sharers. Chapter 10 reports the 572 who have never shared.
Bases and scales
Not everybody answered every question, so the base for each figure is the number of people who answered that question, not the size of the group. Bases are printed under every chart. Where a base falls below 100 the finding is described as indicative rather than reported as a percentage.
Statements were rated on a four-point scale from 0 to 3. Throughout this report, "agree" means a score of 2 or 3, and where a top score is quoted it means 3. Several questions allowed more than one answer. On those, percentages add to more than 100, and this is noted under the chart.
Written answers
1,504 people wrote something in their own words. Quotations are reproduced as written, with spelling corrected and nothing else changed. Where a quote has been shortened, it is shortened only at the start or the end. All quotations are anonymous unless the respondent gave permission to be named.
Comparing with 2025
The 2025 wave ran from August to November 2024 and received 6,129 responses, which becomes 5,748 after the same deduplication rule. 4,073 of those were current sharers.
The surveys ran at different points in the year, so the two samples caught the market at different moments. Several questions also changed wording or scale, including overall experience, sense of community, and the rating of landlords and agents, none of which can be compared this year. Where this report gives a year-on-year figure, both waves asked the question in the same way. Age was collected as a number in 2025 and in bands in 2026, so the 2025 ages have been banded to match.
From 2027 the survey will run in the same months each year, with a fixed set of questions carried forward unchanged, so future comparisons will not carry these limits.
