Updated October 20, 2026
Single women bought 21% of the homes sold in the U.S. last year. Single men bought 9%. Among first-time buyers the gap is wider, 25% to 10%, according to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Married couples are still the biggest group, but single women have been the clear number two for years.
The same report has a less cheerful number in it. Across all buyers, single women had the lowest median household income of any group, $76,400, against $125,000 for married couples. Most single women who buy are doing it on one paycheck, competing for the same houses as two-income households.
So if you’re buying a home as a single woman in Germantown, Collierville, or anywhere else around Memphis, most of the hard questions come back to one income and how much house it can carry. The rest is down payment help, the type of home, and how to size up a street you’ll be living on by yourself.
What the numbers say about single women buyers
NAR’s 2025 Profile surveyed people who bought between July 2024 and June 2025. A few findings matter for anyone shopping alone.
Single women who were first-time buyers had a median household income of $73,000. Single men buying their first home had $66,400. First-time buyers overall put a median of 10% down, and the typical first-time buyer was 40 years old, a record.
Put those together and the picture is a buyer who has usually been working a while, earns a decent salary, and saved the down payment herself. She’s also carrying a decision that a two-income house would split down the middle. If the water heater dies in February, nobody else’s paycheck covers it.
Budget the house on one paycheck
Your lender will tell you what you qualify for. That isn’t the same as what you should spend, and with no second income to absorb a bad month, the difference is yours to carry.
Lenders look at your debt-to-income ratio (DTI): your monthly debt payments divided by your gross monthly income. Many loan programs will approve a DTI in the mid-40s, and some go to 50% with strong credit or savings. The older rule of thumb is tighter. It says to keep the housing payment around 28% of gross income and all debts, house included, around 36%.
Run your own numbers before anyone runs them for you. Say you earn $72,000 a year, or $6,000 a month before taxes:
- 28% for housing is $1,680 a month
- 36% for all debts is $2,160 a month
- With a $400 car payment and a $250 student loan, your house payment would have to fit in $1,510 to stay under 36%
That $1,510 has to cover principal, interest, property taxes, homeowners insurance, mortgage insurance if you put less than 20% down, and any HOA dues. In Germantown and Collierville you pay city property tax on top of Shelby County’s, so the tax line on a listing there runs higher than on a similar house in unincorporated parts of the county. Our breakdown of property taxes in Germantown and Shelby County shows how to estimate it before you make an offer.
We’d rather see a single buyer land near that 28-36% range than at her maximum approval. A couple at 45% DTI has two jobs, so losing one still leaves an income. You have one. Your margin has to live in your budget.
Before closing, build an emergency fund that covers three to six months of the new housing payment, kept apart from the down payment and closing costs. And look at your benefits. If your employer offers long-term disability insurance, take it. For a one-income household, a long illness threatens the house more than any rate change does.
If you aren’t sure where you stand, our checklist for deciding if you’re ready to buy walks through credit, savings, and job history.
Down payment help in Tennessee
The down payment is usually the hardest part for one-income buyers, because you saved it alone. Tennessee has a state program built for this.
The Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA) runs the Great Choice Home Loan, a 30-year fixed mortgage for buyers who fall under THDA’s income and purchase price limits. Those limits are set county by county, so check the current Shelby County chart on thda.org. Everyone on the loan needs a credit score of at least 640.
The down payment piece is Great Choice Plus, which comes in a few forms, per THDA’s down payment assistance page:
- A deferred second loan of up to $6,000 or up to $10,000, at 0% interest with no monthly payment. It’s forgiven after 10 years. If you sell or refinance before then, you repay it in full.
- An amortizing second loan of up to 5% of the price, capped at $15,000, which you pay back over 30 years at your first mortgage’s rate.
- For newly built homes, an amortizing option of up to $25,000 at 0% over 15 years.
THDA requires a homebuyer education class to use the down payment assistance, and you have to work with a THDA-approved lender. You don’t have to be a lifelong renter, either. Buyers who haven’t lived in a home they owned for at least three years can qualify, which helps if you owned a house during a marriage and have rented since.
Mind the 10-year clock. If you might move for work or a relationship within a few years, count on repaying the “forgivable” loan when you sell.
Our post on the truth about down payments covers the low-down-payment loan options beyond THDA, and the first-time buyer guide for Memphis goes through the full process from pre-approval to closing.
Condo, townhome, or single-family house
What kind of home you buy shapes your weekends as much as your budget.
A detached house in Germantown or Collierville usually comes with a real yard, mature trees, gutters, and a roof that are all yours to deal with. Some single buyers love that and some don’t. If you’d be hiring out the mowing, leaf cleanup, and pressure washing anyway, add those costs to the monthly budget before you compare a house to a townhome.
Townhomes sit in the middle, and in the east suburbs there are more of them than there used to be. You get a garage and your own front door, often a small patio, and an HOA that handles the lawn and sometimes the exterior. Collierville in particular has added new townhome communities in the last few years, and we wrote about why more buyers are choosing townhomes in Collierville.
The trade-off is the HOA. Dues come out of the same $1,510 you calculated above, and they can go up. Ask for the budget, the reserve study if there is one, and the last year of board minutes before you commit. Our guide to HOA fees in Germantown and Collierville explains what to look for and what Tennessee law lets an HOA charge.
Condos carry one more wrinkle. If you’re using an FHA loan, the condo project generally needs FHA approval, or the individual unit needs a single-unit approval. Ask your lender to check before you fall for a unit.
Where one income goes further
Germantown and Collierville appeal to single buyers for the same reasons they appeal to families: well-regarded schools (which hold resale value even if you don’t have kids), parks and greenways, and city police and fire departments. Prices there run higher than the rest of the county, though, and a one-income budget feels that first.
If you want the east suburbs, start with the Germantown homes for sale and Collierville homes for sale pages and filter by your real payment, not your approval amount. Set a saved search at that number and let it run for a few weeks; the smaller homes and townhomes in both towns move fast when they’re priced right.
If the numbers don’t work there, Bartlett and Cordova are the usual next stop. Bartlett has its own city services and schools, older brick ranches, and newer subdivisions, usually at lower prices than Germantown. Our home buyer’s guide to Bartlett covers the neighborhoods. Cordova, most of it now inside Memphis city limits, runs along the Germantown and Bartlett edges with a mix of townhomes and single-family homes. It’s worth a look on the Cordova listings page if you work in east Memphis and want a short commute.
Checking a neighborhood when you live alone
Safety comes up with almost every buyer, and people who’ll be living alone tend to ask about it early. It’s a fair question. It also needs answering the right way.
Most agents won’t tell you a neighborhood is “safe” or “not safe,” and that includes ours. Fair housing rules bar agents from steering buyers toward or away from areas, and a casual opinion about safety is where steering often starts. That doesn’t leave you without answers. It means the answers should come from you and from public data:
- Look up crime reports on the city or county police department’s website for the specific streets you’re considering, not the whole zip code.
- Drive the street at 9 p.m. on a weeknight and again on a Saturday afternoon. Notice the lighting, the traffic, and how many porches are lit.
- Walk the route from the parking spot or garage to the front door. A detached garage with a dark path to the house feels different from an attached one.
- Knock on a neighbor’s door. People who live there will usually tell you more in five minutes than any listing will.
On the house itself, plan to rekey or replace every exterior lock the day you close, since you don’t know who has old keys. Check that windows latch and sliding doors have a bar or pin. In a townhome, ask who controls the entry gate code and how often it changes.
Protecting a house in one name
Owning alone means nobody else’s name is on the deed, which keeps decisions simple. It also means you need to plan for what happens if something happens to you.
Have a will that says who gets the house, and ask an estate attorney whether a trust or another arrangement fits your situation. While you’re at it, update the beneficiaries on your retirement accounts and life insurance. A will costs a few hundred dollars. Sorting out a house with no plan behind it costs your family a lot more.
Taxes work a little differently for a single filer. Mortgage interest and property taxes only help if you itemize, and a single person’s standard deduction is half a married couple’s, so itemizing pays off sooner for you than for them. When you sell, single filers can exclude up to $250,000 of profit on a main home, half the $500,000 married couples get. Our breakdown of tax benefits of owning a home runs through both.
Buying with a sister, a friend, or a parent is another route some buyers take to split the cost of a home. It works with a written agreement about who pays what and what happens if one of you wants out. We covered the details in our post on co-buying a home.
Buy the house one paycheck can carry
Pick the payment first. Make it one you could live with during a rough year, on your income alone, with the HOA dues and the city tax bill already in it. Everything else in this guide gets easier once that number is set, and it keeps a lender’s approval letter from deciding for you.
When you have it, get in touch with us. We’ll pull what’s for sale in Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Cordova at that payment and go look at it with you.
