The borrowers traditional underwriting wasn’t built for

Mortgage lending has spent the last several years focused on interest rates, affordability and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Those are important conversations. But another shift may prove just as significant over the next decade: More Americans are earning income outside the traditional paycheck, while much of mortgage underwriting still assumes they don’t. The core issue is straightforward: Underwriting must evolve to reflect how people earn income. That mismatch is becoming impossible to ignore. According to Upwork’s 2026 Future Workforce Index, more than 76 million Americans now participate in freelance work, and roughly half of Gen Z workers already earn at least part of their income independently. For millions of future homebuyers, freelancing isn’t a side hustle, it’s simply how they earn a living. That shift is reshaping the future homebuyer, and underwriting needs to evolve with it. A changing buyer in an unchanged system Even the data on who these buyers are varies. The National Association of Realtors’ most recent survey puts the typical first-time homebuyer at a record age of 40, while the Mortgage Bankers Association, using loan-level data, estimates the figu...