The steepest 12-month home-price decline in the US right now is in Pineville, Kentucky's 40977, where typical home values fell 30.5% — from roughly $120K to $83K. All ten of the largest declines exceed 17% year-over-year, and nine of them cluster in three regions: Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and the Rust Belt. None of them is what most buyers think when they hear "discount."
This list refreshes monthly from the same Zillow ZHVI index that powers every ZIP page on this site. It's a useful indicator of which markets are repricing fast — and a poor guide to which markets you should be buying.
The 10 steepest 12-month declines
Snapshot as of May 2026 (the live list refreshes monthly):
| Rank | ZIP | City, State | Typical home value | 12-mo change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 40977 | Pineville, KY | $83,340 | −30.5% |
| 2 | 15902 | Johnstown, PA | $52,104 | −25.3% |
| 3 | 71254 | Lake Providence, LA | $52,870 | −23.4% |
| 4 | 38756 | Leland, MS | $66,641 | −22.9% |
| 5 | 38701 | Greenville, MS | $61,469 | −21.9% |
| 6 | 42211 | Cadiz, KY | $148,416 | −20.1% |
| 7 | 40312 | Clay City, KY | $130,375 | −20.0% |
| 8 | 41339 | Jackson, KY | $94,163 | −18.9% |
| 9 | 63107 | St. Louis, MO | $44,367 | −18.0% |
| 10 | 48214 | Detroit, MI | $89,148 | −17.3% |
A population floor (5,000) is already applied so the ranking surfaces real cities and towns rather than statistically noisy single-digit-transaction ZIPs.
Three regional patterns dominate the list
Each pattern tells you something different about why prices are falling — and whether a recovery is plausible.
- Appalachian coal-country contraction. Four of the top eight (Pineville, Cadiz, Clay City, Jackson — all in Kentucky) sit in or adjacent to former coal-mining counties. The industry's structural decline started in the 2010s and accelerated through the 2020s; population is following the jobs out. These markets aren't volatile — they're trending. A 20% YoY decline here usually extends a longer-term descent rather than marking a cyclical bottom.
- Mississippi Delta long-term decline. Leland and Greenville, MS reflect the Delta's decades-long economic and population contraction. Median household incomes in these counties are roughly half the US average. There is no thesis under which a primary-residence buy here pencils out as anything other than betting against demographics.
- Rust Belt persistence — with a twist. Johnstown, PA, St. Louis, and Detroit extend a much longer trajectory. The twist: urban-core ZIPs in metros that are themselves repricing (Detroit's broader metro is on the highest-rental-yield list) sometimes have genuine recovery stories at the neighborhood level. Detroit 48214 is the most plausible "watch carefully" entry on the list — but the work is at the block-and-school level, not the ZIP level.
A note about Lake Providence, LA (#3) and Cotulla, TX (#15): both are outliers from the regional pattern — Lake Providence has been on the bottom of US economic mobility rankings for two decades; Cotulla is an oil-patch town whose home values swing with energy prices. Neither fits the "buy the dip" frame.
What we'd actually do with this list
The opinionated view — the part the data alone can't tell you:
- Treat falling prices as evidence to investigate, not evidence to act. The data tells you where prices are moving. The next move is figuring out why: pull the migration data (IRS) for the ZIP, check population trend in the demographics section, check climate-risk exposure on the FEMA NRI row, and look at the ZIP's own price-history chart — does the recent decline extend a 10-year downtrend, or break a previously flat line? The shape of the past matters more than the magnitude of the present.
- Skip the top 5 unless you have a domain-specific reason. Pineville KY, Johnstown PA, Lake Providence LA, Leland MS, Greenville MS — these aren't markets that "recover." They're markets where the long-run trajectory is down, and a sharp annual drop is the trajectory becoming visible at scale. A 30% YoY decline on top of a 40% population loss over two decades isn't a discount; it's a price discovery.
- The interesting entries are the Rust Belt urban cores. Detroit 48214 and St. Louis 63107 sit in metros where SOME neighborhoods have genuine recovery stories (gentrification, infrastructure investment, urban revitalization). The ZIP-level data can't tell you which side of that boundary the property is on — that's block-level work. But if you're going to invest patient capital in a falling-price ZIP, these are the ones where the upside case has historical precedent.
- Use it as a contrarian signal for nearby markets. A 25% decline in Johnstown might mean Pittsburgh's outer suburbs are repricing too — sometimes a few months ahead of the data showing it. The movers page groups losers by region for exactly this read.
The verdict for most readers: do not buy from this list. Use it to understand which markets are repricing and as a starting point for research into the adjacent markets that haven't yet shown up in the data. The most-valuable use of this list is to make you skeptical of the adjacent appreciation stories.
How to use this list
For research, not selection:
- Pick the ZIP that intersects something you already know — a regional economy, a state you've invested in, a family connection. The list is too geographically diverse to act on without local context.
- Pull that ZIP's full page on this site and read its 25-year price history chart. The decline-vs-cycle pattern is what matters: a 20% drop after a flat 2010s is structurally different from a 20% drop after a 2020-22 spike.
- Run the rental-yield math at the new (lower) price. Most of these markets have rents that fell with prices; the yield isn't necessarily better at the new lower price.
- Cross-reference migration data (the ZIP page's Migration section) before assuming any "discount" is real.
Frequently asked
Are these ZIPs buying opportunities? Almost certainly not in the traditional sense. The largest 12-month declines almost always reflect long-term structural shifts (industry decline, population outflow, climate exposure) rather than cyclical lows. Markets that fall 20%+ in a year usually keep falling — they don't bounce back to the previous price within 1-2 years. The exceptions are rare and require local research the headline number can't substitute for.
Why do Kentucky ZIPs dominate the top of the list? Four of the top eight (Pineville, Cadiz, Clay City, Jackson) sit in or near former coal-mining counties in Appalachia. The industry's decline accelerated in the 2010s and now shows up as compounding home-value losses as residents leave and housing stock ages. The same dynamic appears in West Virginia ZIPs that sit just below the top 10. It's a regional economy in long-term contraction, not a temporary correction.
Could any of these be gentrifying urban neighborhoods? Detroit's 48214 and St. Louis's 63107 are the most plausible candidates — both sit in metros where adjacent neighborhoods have genuine revitalization stories. But the ZIP-level data can't tell you whether a specific property is in the part that's recovering or the part that's still declining. That's block-level work. Treat them as "investigate carefully" entries, not "buy" entries.
How often is this list updated? Monthly. We recompute 12-month price changes for every US ZIP each time Zillow's ZHVI index refreshes. The live movers page shows the current top 25 gainers and top 25 losers — broader than this top 10. A 5,000-population floor is applied so the list surfaces real cities and towns rather than statistical noise from small ZIPs.
Next steps
For a deeper look at the methodology behind ZHVI and what the index actually measures, see how to read a ZIP-code price history chart. To pair the decline data with the other end of the spectrum, the 10 highest-rental-yield ZIPs overlaps with this list in interesting ways — the same Rust Belt urban cores show up on both, and the comparison is part of what makes either list actionable.
Data: Zillow ZHVI, latest available month, ZIP-level. 12-month change computed as (latest − value_12mo_ago) / value_12mo_ago. Refreshed monthly. 5,000-population floor applied. The live movers page shows the always-current top 25 in each direction. See methodology for the full calculation.