House hunters staring at online listings are running into a brutal tradeoff: in wide-open states like Wyoming, the typical home for sale is sprawling, while pockets of the Bay Area and Boston still slap some of the highest price-per-square-foot tags in the country. Shift your search a few hours down the road, or over a state line, and you might swap a lot of square footage for a serious case of sticker shock.
The figures come from a nationwide analysis by NetCredit, which combed through more than 250,000 Zillow listings across 430 cities to calculate average listing size and price per square foot. The firm says the dataset runs through February 2026 and is built strictly from active listings, not closed sales. The New York Post picked up the study in today's feature that boiled NetCredit’s charts into a more consumer-friendly rundown. Its write-up pointed out that Sunnyvale clocked in around $1,045.81 per square foot, while nearby Santa Clara and Boston hovered near $999.52 and $1,013.84 per square foot. The coverage helped push NetCredit’s interactive breakdown in front of a much bigger audience of frustrated (or curious) shoppers.
Where the Biggest Homes Are
On raw space, Wyoming comes out on top in NetCredit’s state-by-state look. The average listing there is about 2,627 square feet, and Cheyenne leads the city pack at roughly 2,634 square feet. For context, that is a big jump from more compact states like Pennsylvania, where the average for-sale home clocks in at about 1,576 square feet, according to NetCredit.
Where Square Footage Goes the Farthest
If you care more about cost per foot than sheer size, the real action is in the South and parts of the Midwest. Jackson, Mississippi, showed an average asking price around $88.58 per square foot, and Peoria, Illinois, came in at about $95.59, figures highlighted by the New York Post. For buyers priced out of coastal markets, those numbers are a reminder that the same budget can buy a very different lifestyle depending on your ZIP code.
What Buyers Should Keep in Mind
All of this is a snapshot of what sellers are asking, not a promise of what deals will actually close. Listing square footage and price per foot can be skewed by everything from lot size and renovation quality to hyper-local demand. NetCredit’s study also filters out extreme listings under $50,000 and above $5 million to keep the averages from getting too wild. The underlying data come from active listings on Zillow, so anyone who wants to poke around the individual properties behind these rankings can follow the trail straight to the source.
