Go to pearlscore.com right now. Type in your address. What comes back is a number between 1 and 1,000 that quantifies how well your home actually performs across five dimensions: Safety, Comfort, Operations, Resilience, and Energy. Pearl, a Charlottesville-based B Corp founded in 2013, has modeled all 92 million single-family homes in America and assigned each one a score. Free. Public. Searchable by anyone with a browser, including the person who might buy your house next year.
That alone would be interesting. What makes it consequential is what Realtor.com did with the data two days ago. They put a dollar sign on it.
On June 23, 2026, Realtor.com published a study powered by Pearl SCORE that, for the first time at national scale, quantifies the gap between what a home costs to buy and what it costs to own. Buyers of a newly built home save an average of $25,335 over the first 10 years compared to buyers of a home built 20 years ago. Not because new homes are cheaper to purchase, but because older homes bleed money every single month in utility bills and major system replacements that never appear in a listing price.
Where the Money Goes
Pearl and Realtor.com modeled a 1,750-square-foot reference home at the ZIP code level, then aggregated results to produce state-level estimates, and two cost streams drive the savings: utility costs, calculated from modeled energy consumption multiplied by state retail gas and electric prices with an EIA escalation factor projected forward over ten years, alongside replacement costs for the three systems most likely to fail catastrophically in an aging home, specifically HVAC equipment, roofing materials, and water heaters.
The national average of $25,335 hides enormous geographic variation, and the pattern it reveals should alarm homeowners in the South and comfort those in New England, because Massachusetts leads the country at $38,927 in 10-year new-construction savings while Arkansas sits at the bottom with just $15,247. Nearly $24,000 per home. That gap traces directly to two factors: climate severity and building code stringency.
| State | 10-Year Savings | New-Build Premium | IECC Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts | $38,927 | 46.7% | 2021 |
| New Hampshire | $35,885 | 45.5% | 2018 |
| Maine | $34,763 | 48.3% | 2021 |
| Rhode Island | $34,641 | 46.6% | 2024 |
| Vermont | $33,998 | 25.9% | 2021 |
Source: Realtor.com/Pearl, "Total Cost of Ownership," June 2026. Premium = median new-construction price vs. existing.
| State | 10-Year Savings | New-Build Premium | IECC Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas | $15,247 | 36.4% | 2018 |
| South Carolina | $16,163 | -3.5% | 2009 |
| Kentucky | $16,392 | 31.4% | 2015 |
| Florida | $16,644 | -2.7% | 2021 |
| Texas | $18,227 | 10.5% | 2015 |
Source: Realtor.com/Pearl, June 2026.
Building Codes Have a Price Tag Now
Four of the five top-saving states have adopted International Energy Conservation Code editions from 2021 or later, while only one of the bottom five has. Look at the extremes: Rhode Island, on the 2024 IECC, delivers $34,641 in 10-year savings, while South Carolina, still running 2009 code, delivers $16,163. That is a $18,478 difference in homeowner costs between two states, driven in significant part by how aggressively their legislatures updated their energy codes over the past 15 years.
This pattern lets us do math that nobody in the building code debate usually bothers with, because it finally attaches a dollar figure to the cost of inaction.
States running 2021-or-later IECC codes average roughly $35,500 in modeled 10-year savings. States stuck on 2015-or-earlier codes average around $17,300. Climate differences account for part of that spread, no question, since northern states burn more heating energy and stand to save more per insulation upgrade. But even within similar climate zones, code vintage correlates with savings at a level that should concern any state legislator blocking updates.
Now scale it up to the national level, where the math gets striking. Around 1.4 million new single-family homes get permitted annually, according to Census Bureau estimates, and if each code cycle advancement generates roughly $9,000 in incremental per-home savings over 10 years, one three-year code update cycle deployed nationwide would produce something in the neighborhood of $12.7 billion in cumulative homeowner savings. Imprecise? Yes. That number ignores regional variation, compliance gaps, and the reality that not every jurisdiction enforces its adopted code with equal rigor. But it is large enough to reframe the code adoption debate entirely, from "how much does compliance cost builders?" to "how much does non-adoption cost homeowners?"
Sixteen Markets Where New Beats Old on Day One
Nationally, new construction costs about $60,000 more than existing homes at the median, with the gap running from roughly $450,000 for new builds to just above $390,000 for resale homes according to Realtor.com's Q1 2026 data. But not everywhere.
In 50 of the 300 largest metropolitan areas, new construction already lists below existing homes at the median, and in another 16 metros new homes cost more upfront but the 10-year savings from lower utility and maintenance costs erase the price gap entirely.
| Metro | New Build | Existing | 10-Year Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Diego, CA | $1,226,693 | $1,210,500 | $29,243 |
| Salt Lake City, UT | $652,982 | $637,650 | $27,670 |
| Salem, OR | $545,333 | $517,467 | $31,404 |
| San Antonio, TX | $339,642 | $329,083 | $18,227 |
| Abilene, TX | $310,873 | $298,933 | $18,227 |
Source: Realtor.com, Q1 2026 listing data + Pearl savings models.
Salem, Oregon, tells the story most clearly: a buyer pays $27,866 more for new construction, but over 10 years Pearl's models project $31,404 in utility and replacement savings. Net gain: $3,538. Add a builder warranty that likely covers HVAC failures for two years, and the new build wins before the buyer even changes the furnace filter.
Realtor.com's researchers note that the $25,335 national figure is conservative, because it assumes full out-of-pocket costs for both homeowners and ignores both builder warranty coverage and mortgage rate buydowns. Factor in the average one-percentage-point rate discount that new-construction buyers have been receiving, and the math tilts much further: on a $450,000 home with 10% down, that rate difference is worth roughly $250 per month, or about $30,000 over 10 years.
What the Score Actually Measures
Pearl SCORE breaks down into five pillars. Safety covers indoor air quality, carbon monoxide risk, radon exposure, hazardous materials, and potable water quality, while Comfort addresses thermal consistency, acoustic insulation, and humidity control across the home's living spaces through the full range of seasonal conditions. Operations tracks maintenance costs, system age, and the statistical likelihood of major failures in the next decade. Resilience measures how well a home withstands its region's most common threats: windstorms, hail, flooding, wildfire. Energy evaluates the building envelope's thermal performance, HVAC efficiency, and whether the home generates any of its own power through solar panels or battery storage systems.
Each pillar draws on a mix of public records, building permits, utility cost models, climate data, and Pearl's own proprietary benchmarks, and the resulting score creates a single number that collapses dozens of variables into something a buyer can compare on a listing page. A newly built home in Massachusetts with modern insulation, a sealed building envelope, and a cold-climate heat pump will score dramatically higher than a 2005 ranch in San Antonio running its original single-pane windows and a 15-year-old gas furnace that has never been professionally serviced. Whether that score accurately reflects the lived experience of paying bills and calling repair technicians depends entirely on whether Pearl's underlying models reflect reality.
And that is exactly where the skepticism needs to live.
Where the Numbers Could Lie
Pearl's methodology relies on modeled estimates, not actual metered utility bills, and modeled consumption can diverge sharply from metered usage because occupant behavior, the single largest variable in residential energy consumption, is absent from the model entirely. A family of six in a high-scoring home will pay more than a single retiree in a low-scoring one. Pearl acknowledges this in its white paper, but the consumer-facing score makes no adjustment for occupancy patterns, household size, or individual usage habits.
Then there is the data problem. Public records are a notoriously shaky foundation for modeling anything about a home's physical condition, because permit data is incomplete, homeowner-performed upgrades go unrecorded, and unpermitted renovations remain invisible to any algorithm that relies on municipal databases. Deferred maintenance creates a widening gap between what the model thinks a home contains and what actually sits behind the drywall. A 2005 home whose owner invested $40,000 in a deep energy retrofit could perform identically to a new build, but Pearl's model will not know about those upgrades unless the owner manually inputs them through the platform.
Realtor.com's savings projections also depend on EIA energy price escalation factors that extrapolate historical trends forward, and anyone who watched natural gas prices whipsaw during 2022 understands how dangerous that extrapolation can be when markets move sideways in directions no model anticipated.
What This Analysis Did Not Prove
- Whether Pearl SCORE predicts actual utility bills with meaningful accuracy for individual homes. No independent validation study comparing Pearl scores against metered consumption has been published.
- Whether the scoring model handles unpermitted improvements, DIY upgrades, or regional building practice variations correctly. Input data quality limits output accuracy.
- Whether the 1,750-square-foot reference home generalizes to smaller starter homes or larger custom builds, where insulation-to-volume ratios and system sizing differ substantially.
- Whether EIA-sourced energy price escalation factors remain valid under volatile fuel markets or rapid electrification scenarios.
Who Wins and Who Loses
Builders win, unambiguously, because this data hands them a quantitative argument that a higher sticker price is actually cheaper over a decade, and Realtor.com just built the sales tool directly into every new-construction listing page with interactive, personalized savings estimates that any agent can pull up in five seconds.
Owners of older homes in low-code states lose leverage. South Carolina adopted the 2009 IECC and never moved, so a 20-year-old home there shows only $16,163 in modeled savings if replaced by new construction, but the score itself will become a negotiating weapon regardless of whether the economics are dramatic in a given market. Picture the conversation. Buyer walks into a showing, pulls up the Pearl SCORE on their phone: "This house is a 380, the new development off Route 276 is a 720, justify the asking price." Sellers who have invested in real upgrades will need permits and invoices to prove it.
And here is the distributional concern that Pearl's own founders should take seriously: performance scores reflect the housing stock as built and maintained, which means that neighborhoods with historically weaker code enforcement, lower rates of permitted renovation, and older infrastructure will cluster at the bottom of the scale. Those neighborhoods correlate, in well-documented ways, with lower-income and minority communities, not because of occupant behavior but because of decades of unequal investment in housing quality and code enforcement. If Pearl SCORE becomes a factor in appraisals, lending, or insurance pricing, it risks becoming another mechanism that reinforces existing disparities rather than correcting them.
What to Do With This
If you are buying a home, pull the Pearl SCORE before you make an offer, compare it against nearby new construction, and run the 10-year math yourself using Realtor.com's interactive tool. Ask the seller whether major systems have been replaced and request documentation. A low score is not a death sentence for a home; it is a signal that you need to verify the model's assumptions against physical reality before you sign anything.
If you are selling an older home, get ahead of this now by documenting every upgrade with permits, invoices, and warranty records. Pearl lets homeowners submit verified improvements that update their score. Do it before listing, not after a buyer flags the number in negotiation.
If you are building, this data is your sales pitch: show buyers the score differential alongside their estimated monthly savings, because a $60,000 premium that pays for itself in 10 years, or faster when rate buydowns and warranties factor in, is an easier conversation than asking someone to take your word that new is better.
And if you are a state legislator still blocking IECC code updates because builders in your district complain about compliance costs, look at the Massachusetts-to-Arkansas savings spread. Your constituents are paying $15,000 to $24,000 more over a decade to own homes built to outdated standards. That is not a building industry issue. That is a consumer protection failure, and it now has a number attached to it.