If you’re looking for a house and want to spend a reasonable percentage of your salary on your mortgage payment, have you considered moving to Macon County, Illinois in farm country in the center of the state? Or Perhaps Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, outside of Allentown?

Thoওse counties—where the typical mortgage payment takes up less than 15% of the typical income—are among the few remaining places in the country where mortgage payments to buy a house remain affordable, according to a Thursday report by property data company ATTOM.

Out of 578 U.S. counties that Attom analyzed, housing was affordable in only 21% of them in the third quarter. The affordability standard used across the real estate industry calls for a payment that takes up 28% of household income or less.

ATTOM looked at c♛ounties with a population of more than 100,000, and more than 50 home sales in the third quarter. In most of the country, housing costs far exceed the affordability threshold, as the map below shows.

Attom’s report adds to a pile of increasingl🐟y grim data about 𒐪homebuying affordability.

Typical earners would have to spend a crushing 43.8% of their annual income to afford mortgage, insurance, and tax payments for a newly bought house in August, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta released this week. That's the highest in home affordability data going back to 2006.

An affordability index by the National Association of Realtors stayed at its worst in July since data began in 1989, the association said earlier this month.

With a market that hostile, how is anyone managing to buy a home if they aren’t already homeowners with equity to tap into?

“The overwhelming majority of my first-time home buyer clients are getting help from their parents or other family members for the downpayment. Lucky for them!” Beatrice DeJong, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, said in an email.

Those buyers are indeed lucky—you would need an annual income of $206,276 to afford payments on a median-priced home in Los Angeles County,  and the median annual salary there is just $79,456 according to Attom’s data.

The surge in mortgage rates since 2022 is the main source of homebuyers’ woes, compounded by home prices that surged during the pandemic and have yet to come down. The Federal Reserve’s monetary stimulus policies helped push average mortgage rates to record lows of under 3% in 2021, only to reverse course in 2022 when the Fed started raising rates to combat inflation.

The average rate offered for a 30-year mortgage last week was 7.31%, the highest since December 2000, Freddie Mac said Thursday. Between higher rates and higher prices, the average monthly payment to buy a house has soared to $2,177 as of July, more than double from 2020 according to the NAR.

Home prices have risen 45% since the pandemic began and have stayed high, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Higher mortgage rates have hurt demand for homes, with many buyers bowing out of the market. They’ve also hurt supply because many would-be sellers are reluctant to give up the ultra-low rates they secured during the pandemic. With supply and demand deadlocked, prices haven’t moved much, at least not yet.

“The dynamics influencing the U.S. housing market appear to continuously work against everyday Americans, potentially to the point where they could start to have a significant impact on home prices,” said Rob Barber, CEO for ATTOM, in a statement. “With basic homeownership now soaking up more than a third of average pay, the stage is set for some potential buyers to be priced out, which would reduce demand and the upward pressure on prices.”