Solo Dwellers Turn Spare Rooms Into Studios

Podcast studios are the fastest-growing room in the American home, at least on Taskrabbit's platform. Bookings to build them rose 90 percent year over year in the company's 2026 Trend Report, released October 16, 2026. Home gyms rose 59 percent, saunas 35 percent and craft rooms 33 percent.

The report compares Taskrabbit booking and search data from January through July 2026 against the same stretch of 2025. It groups the findings under a name, the Independent Home: people living alone aren't treating their homes as a waiting room for a shared life later. They're building rooms around the life they have now.

The underlying numbers point the same way. Mentions of living alone in bookings rose 58 percent, and searches and bookings for help moving alone rose 24 percent. Total completed jobs on the platform climbed 21 percent, led by cleaning at 29 percent, furniture assembly and yard work at 23 percent each, and plumbing help at 17 percent.

A spare room is the raw material. A guest room earns its keep a few weekends a year, while a gym, a sauna or a recording corner works every week, and that arithmetic is hard to argue with at current rents. General decorating requests rose 57 percent too, which suggests the projects aren't purely practical.

Taskrabbit names two companion trends. The Solo Homeowner shows up in a 74 percent jump in handyman bookings, the sound of people who own the whole problem list hiring it out one task at a time. The Post-Breakup Reset shows up in a 39 percent rise in fresh-start searches and bookings.

Tamara Rosenthal, the company's senior vice president of marketing, said the 90 percent spike in podcast studios grabbed the team's attention, alongside the sauna and gym jumps. A studio is the telling one: it isn't about comfort or resale value. It's a room built for a voice, an audience and a version of work that didn't exist in the house before.

The data carries a built-in caveat, and the report's readers should keep it. Taskrabbit measures people who hire help through Taskrabbit, a group that skews toward renters and owners with disposable income and a phone-first habit. It isn't a census of American homes, and a booking surge can reflect the platform's own growth as much as the country's taste.

Even with that discount, the direction is consistent across every category the company publishes. The spare room used to be held open for hypothetical guests. In 2026 it's being claimed, measured and wired for the person who actually lives there, and the guest, when one comes, gets the couch.