Fifteen years of Hamptons prices.

The median rose about 146% since 2011.

The Hamptons median sale price (year to date at the fourth quarter) reached $2.08 million in 2025, its highest on record and about 146% above 2011 in nominal dollars. It rose through the 2020 surge and kept rising after. Changes in the mix of homes sold also move a median.

Volume tells the other half of the story: Hamptons sales nearly halved between 2020 and 2023, from 2,186 to 992, while the median kept setting records. When the constraint is supply, price and volume come apart.

The scarcity is engineered.

Supply is legally, permanently constrained. Since April 1999 the Community Preservation Fund has taken roughly $2 billion out of the transaction stream and spent it removing land from the market forever. Nearly half the housing stock in East Hampton is seasonal. This is a market where the buyer pool is national and the inventory is finite and shrinking.

Three moments that shaped the record.

1. 1999
   The market starts buying itself

   The Peconic Bay Community Preservation Fund takes effect on 1 April 1999: a 2% buyer-side transfer tax on East End sales that funds land and historic preservation and, under authorized programs, water-quality work. Cumulative collections across the five East End towns now exceed $2 billion, roughly $881 million of it in Southampton alone. Land preservation limits development in parts of the East End; it is not the same thing as the number of homes for sale.

2. 2020-2021
   The migration quarter

   The Hamptons market went vertical in the spring of 2021. Q2 closed 675 sales against 433 a year earlier, inventory fell 43% to 1,081 homes, and months of supply dropped from 13.2 to 4.8, the tightest in the record. National buyers arrived faster than the East End could list.

3. 2022-2023
   The market held

   Demand cooled in 2022, and the market held. Sales slowed sharply, and the median went on to a new high in 2025. Active listings fluctuated over the period, and prices also depend on demand, financing and the mix of homes sold.

The villages behind the median.

The Hamptons trades as a single median. Underneath it are 63 markets that do not move together — each a single published number for the stated year, with the base year shown wherever a change begins later than its label.

The full South Fork and North Fork record.

In the smallest hamlets a year can rest on a handful of sales; read the direction, not the decimal. Where a figure rests on a single reporting source it is marked as such and is never presented as corroborated.