Just 35% of homeowners who hired a professional in the past year took on an actual renovation, compared with 63% who paid for maintenance and 58% who paid for repairs, according to Angi’s own 2026 State of Home Spending Pulse report. That gap is the whole story of home spending in 2026: discretionary upgrades are getting shelved while the unglamorous, non-negotiable work — the leaky roof, the aging water heater, the HVAC tune-up — keeps getting funded no matter what else gets cut.
The Numbers Behind the Pullback
Angi surveyed 1,000 U.S. homeowners who’d hired a professional within the past 12 months, fielding the survey in July 2026. The topline finding was blunt: homeowners are “postponing plans due to cost, and prioritizing essential repairs and preventative maintenance over discretionary upgrades,” per the company’s own release. Nearly a quarter of homeowners who delayed a project said an unplanned or emergency need had jumped ahead of it in line, which is a fairly direct signal that budgets are tight enough that only the urgent stuff gets greenlit.
Cost overruns aren’t helping. Ninety-two percent of homeowners who completed a project this year finished at or above their original budget, and 43% went over their estimate entirely, with more than a third of that group spending at least 30% more than planned. When a kitchen remodel routinely costs a third more than quoted, it’s not hard to see why homeowners are choosing to fix the furnace instead of finally redoing the primary bath.
Independent Data Backs Up the Slowdown
Angi isn’t the only one seeing this. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which tracks the industry through its own Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity, projected annual home improvement spending would reach $519 billion through mid-2027, with year-over-year growth decelerating to just 0.5% by the second quarter of that year — the third straight quarter of slowing growth. The center’s own researchers pointed to flattened remodeling permits and softer retail sales of building products as the underlying cause, tying the slowdown to reduced housing starts and broader economic uncertainty rather than any single factor.
Why Maintenance Keeps Winning
Material costs are a big part of the answer. Independent reporting on the Angi survey noted that building material prices climbed roughly 7.4% year over year as of July 2026, on top of ongoing labor and transportation cost pressure. That kind of inflation makes a discretionary project like a kitchen overhaul feel riskier to greenlight, while a repair — a broken water line, a failing furnace — isn’t really optional regardless of what it costs. There’s also the age of the housing stock working against homeowners: an estimated 47% of owner-occupied U.S. homes were built before 1980, meaning a growing share of the country’s housing needs more frequent, more expensive upkeep just to function, whether or not anyone wants to spend money on it this year.
The Motivation to Act Hasn’t Disappeared
It’s not all retreat. Fifty-nine percent of homeowners in Angi’s survey said cheaper materials would be enough to get them moving on a postponed project, and 54% pointed to lower inflation as a motivator, which suggests the demand for renovations hasn’t vanished so much as it’s been priced out for now. More than one in four homeowners said they were actually accelerating some projects specifically to get ahead of future price increases, a hedge against costs climbing even further. And the long-term appetite for home investment is still strong: 66% of respondents said they plan to make a major home investment within the next five years, and 97% said their home helps them manage stress day to day.
What This Means for Anyone Planning a Project
The practical read here is that 2026 rewards prioritizing function over aesthetics. If a budget is tight, the data suggests most homeowners are already making that call instinctively — funding the furnace and the roof before the countertops and the primary suite. That’s not necessarily bad strategy. Deferred maintenance tends to compound into bigger, more expensive problems, while a kitchen remodel can usually wait another year without anything getting worse. The homeowners best positioned for 2026’s market are the ones treating repairs as the floor, not the ceiling, and saving discretionary spending for whenever material costs finally give them some room to breathe.
