Research study
The state of the American garage
What 54 years of federal construction data show about how the garage became standard, and what a year of source-checking found.
Written by HyreGarage Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis
Audited by HyreGarage Research Desk Computation, scope and retrieval-date audit
The finding
The garage became standard on new American houses, and the South drove it. In 1971, 45% of new single-family houses in the South had a garage. By 2025 it was 88%, a 43-point rise and the largest of any region. That is from HyreGarage’s count of the Census Survey of Construction parking series (retrieved 2026-09-06).
What did we find?
The West was already at 68% in 1971 and is at 94% today. The Northeast went from 66% to 83%, still the lowest. The South went from 45% to 88%.
It was on 17% of new single-family completions in 1971 and 2% in 2025.
Adding up the series from 1971 to 2025: 45.55 million garages on new single-family houses, out of 55.68 million completions. Every one has a door, most have an opener, and all have a counterbalance (the springs that lift the door) that will eventually fail.
No federal dataset counts garage door openers or records a garage’s size in feet.
HyreGarage holds 3,901 garage door companies in ten verified states and 2,709 cities, with 457 primary-verified license records. That is not a national roster, and nothing here is a national industry figure.
How should you read this report?
A summary like this needs clear limits even more than a single study.
The Survey of Construction records what is being built, not what exists. Most American garages were built decades ago, and no survey has gone back to them.
Our company store covers Texas, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, California, North Carolina, Washington, Tennessee and Nevada. Nothing from it is a national figure, and we do not present one.
The Census records garages in cars: one, two, three or more. No federal dataset records a garage in feet, so this report has no size figures at all.
Each fact below links to the study that established it, with its sources, limits and gaps in full. This page summarizes; it does not re-argue.
cpsc.gov blocked every request we sent (an HTTP 403 error) throughout this work, and no federal dataset counts openers anyway. The relevant studies document both gaps.
The store records what we can verify about companies. It is not a ranking, this is not an awards page, and no company is named here.
Why did the garage become standard? Mostly because of the South
Nationally, the story looks like a gentle rise: about 57% of new single-family houses had a garage in 1971, about 89% today. That reads like a slow, even shift in taste.
By region, it is nothing like that. Three of the four Census regions already had mostly garaged new houses in 1971: the West at 68%, the Midwest at 68, the Northeast at 66. The South was at 45.
By 1990 the South reached 69%. By 2005, 87. It is now at 88, close to the Midwest at 92 and the West at 94.
HyreGarage analysis: this is more than a regional footnote, because of where houses got built. The South took most of America’s housing growth over this period. A 43-point rise in the region doing most of the building is most of the national trend.
So the modern American garage is largely a Southern building: newer, in a warmer climate, and attached to houses built under codes that were changing fast.
The Northeast is the outlier at the other end. It rose 17 points in 54 years and has been flat since 1990: 81% in 1990, 85 in 2005, 81 in 2015, 83 today.
It is the one region where many new houses still have no garage or carport. That fits denser building, older streets and smaller lots.
None of this describes the existing stock, and we want to be careful. A region that has built garages eagerly since 1990 still has plenty of older housing. For the existing stock, see how many American homes have a garage.
What share of new houses get a garage, by region?
Between 83% and 94% in 2025. HyreGarage computed this from the Census regional parking series. The change column shows what the national average hides.
| Region | 1971 | 1990 | 2005 | 2015 | 2025 | Change since 1971 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South | 45% | 69% | 87% | 89% | 88% | +43 pts |
| West | 68% | 94% | 96% | 96% | 94% | +26 pts |
| Midwest | 68% | 91% | 94% | 92% | 92% | +24 pts |
| Northeast | 66% | 81% | 85% | 81% | 83% | +17 pts |
Share of new single-family houses completed with a one-car, two-car or three-or-more-car garage. Carports are counted separately, not here. HyreGarage computation from parking_cust.xls, retrieved 2026-09-06.
What happened to the carport?
It nearly vanished. The carport was once a common American building form, so its decline is worth recording.
In 1971, 17% of new single-family houses had one: about one house in six. In 2025 the figure is 2%. Across 1971 to 2025, 2,040 thousand houses were built with a carport, against 45,552 thousand with a garage.
It fell fastest just as the garage arrived. The carport share was in the teens in the 1970s, 5% by the mid-1980s and 2% by 1990, where it has stayed.
HyreGarage analysis: we did not establish why, and we will not pretend to. Several things likely played a part, and the data cannot separate them.
A garage offers security and storage a carport does not. Air conditioning made an enclosed space easier to live with in the South. And a garage is finished floor space; a carport is not.
What the data does show: houses that once would have had a carport now have a garage. The share built with neither also fell sharply, from 26% to 9%.
The practical result is upkeep. A carport has no door, no springs, no opener and no sensors. Every one of the 45.55 million garages built since 1971 has all four, and each part wears out. Our study of how long a garage door lasts covers the service life.
What did a year of research establish?
These facts, each settled by its own study. Every row links to the study with the sources, math and limits in full.
| What is established | Study |
|---|---|
| Federal entrapment protection has applied to every opener made since January 1, 1993, and built-in protection since January 1, 1991 | Two statutory dates, not one |
| Four garage door or opener recalls exist in the entire CPSC database. The largest, in 2023, was a failure of that second layer of protection | The full recall record |
| One state, California, requires a battery backup on residential openers, at $1,000 per opener | Battery backup laws |
| Two of the three states where we hold license records have a license class naming this trade. Arizona records it as free text | Who licenses installers |
| A spring is rated in cycles, not years. The same 10,000-cycle spring gives 13.7 years to one household and 2.7 to another | How long a spring lasts |
| The R-value on a garage door describes one section, and DASMA says it “should not be used for garage door assemblies” | R-value claims |
| The 268% ROI figure divides a modeled cost into a Realtor opinion survey. No sale is observed | Where the ROI number comes from |
| Published clinical evidence on garage door repair describes seven people who lost most or all sight in an eye attempting it | Repair, not operation |
Every linked study carries its own dataset and retrieval date. Where a study could not retrieve a source, it says so on its own page rather than here.
What is still not measured anywhere?
A lot. The most consistent finding of the year is how much about the American garage nobody records. These are gaps in the record, not places we failed to look.
Nobody counts garage door openers
Not the Census, not the American Housing Survey (we read its 2023 Definitions file: it records garage presence and has no opener item), and not the Survey of Construction. A product Congress legislated about directly has never been counted nationally.
Nobody measures a garage
Capacity in cars is recorded. Size in feet is not recorded anywhere. Every “standard garage size” you see is a builder habit with no dataset behind it.
Nobody tracks safety devices after installation
The recall record shows factory defects are rare. No register, inspection program, survey or reporting duty covers sensors that are bypassed, misaligned or blocked in use. That is likely where the remaining risk sits.
Nobody publishes spring failure data
Makers publish cycle ratings. How long springs actually last in use is recorded by no one: no registry, no public warranty-claim data, no survey question.
Nobody publishes what the insurance credit is worth
Florida law requires insurers to give a discount for opening protection. The amount sits in each insurer’s rate filings, and we could not retrieve one.
And CPSC was unreachable to us throughout
cpsc.gov blocked every request we sent (an HTTP 403 error) for this whole period, though the separate SaferProducts REST API answered. So every injury question on this site stays open, and each page says so instead of filling the gap.
What company data does this desk hold?
Company records for ten states. We publish our own coverage so you don’t have to take it on trust. These are counts from our store, and they describe ten states only.
| State | Companies in store |
|---|---|
| Texas | 798 |
| Florida | 791 |
| Arizona | 380 |
| Colorado | 358 |
| Georgia | 332 |
| California | 312 |
| North Carolina | 296 |
| Washington | 277 |
| Tennessee | 232 |
| Nevada | 126 |
| Ten verified states | 3,901 |
Counted from data/garage-data on 2026-09-06. Also: 2,709 cities, 457 primary-verified license records in California, Nevada and Arizona, 3,642 review records and 1,907 scored companies. These count what we hold, not the garage door companies in any state. No national figure comes from them.
What could change next year?
Four things we are watching. A report is worth more if it says in advance what would change it.
Whether the three-car garage keeps shrinking. It peaked at 24% of new houses in 2015 and is at 15% today. Two more years of decline would make it a settled trend, and it runs against cars that keep getting wider. See cars got bigger, garages did not.
Whether any state follows California on battery backup. California has stood alone since 2019, and the trade press asked then whether it would spread. The bill search we needed for a fifty-state check blocked our requests. Once it works again, that check is quick.
Whether the Cost vs. Value figure holds. Garage door replacement went from 93% of cost recouped in 2022 to 268% in 2025, driven entirely by a Realtor opinion survey. A number that tripled in three years on survey answers can fall back.
Whether CPSC becomes reachable. Several open questions need NEISS, CPSC’s injury database, and nothing else: how often garage door injuries happen, whether the 1993 standard cut entrapment deaths, and whether repair or everyday use causes more harm. They are not hard questions. They sit behind a door we could not open.
HyreGarage analysis, the honest summary of the year: the garage is now on almost every new house and getting slightly smaller in capacity. It holds a part under lethal tension, the spring, that almost no one licenses anyone to service. And federal statistics measure it in almost none of the ways a homeowner would want.
The gap between how much the garage matters and how little of it is recorded turned up on every page we wrote.
Questions
What share of American homes have a garage?
Which part of the country adopted the garage last?
What happened to carports?
How many garages have been built in America?
Are new houses still built without garages?
How many garage door companies are there in America?
What was the most surprising finding from a year of this research?
Are garages getting bigger or smaller?
Does HyreGarage rank garage door companies?
Can I reproduce the construction figures?
Written and audited by
HyreGarage Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are not a garage door company. We read the agency file, the code record, the standards document or the public register ourselves, compute the figure from it, and publish it with the source and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. Our own company records cover ten states; nothing national is ever derived from them.
- 10
- states our own company records cover — and the limit of any claim made from them
- 3,901
- garage door companies in the store
- 457
- license records verified against a state board
- 0
- national claims made from a ten-state store
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Injury counts come from CPSC. Housing counts come from the Census file, not from a summary of it. Code history comes from the building commission that adopted the code. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we retrieve the source and do the arithmetic ourselves.
- Every figure carries its retrieval date. Registers change, datasets are revised and codes are amended. A number without the date it was read cannot be checked, so every study states one.
- Fact, calculation and analysis are labeled apart. A quote is a quote, a HyreGarage computation says so, and an interpretation says “HyreGarage analysis”. Presenting our reading of a dataset as something the agency stated would be the easiest way to lose the only thing this desk is for.
- Limitations go above the fold. If a figure is an upper bound, a bracket, or an association rather than a cause, that is said before the figure is quoted rather than in a footnote underneath it.
- No DIY instructions for spring, cable or track work. Those components hold enough stored energy to cause serious injury, and CPSC records the consequences. We describe what has failed and what a competent repair involves; we do not tell you how to do it.
Data as of Census Survey of Construction and the HyreGarage data store, retrieved 2026-09-06. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Work needed on yours?
Whatever the national picture, the useful questions are local: what failed, what the replacement is rated for, and whether three quotes describe the same job.
HyreGarage is not a garage door company and does not perform, supervise or warrant garage door work. We do not rate, rank or endorse any company, and every figure from our own store describes ten states.