The route to residential independence is not a one-way street; many young adults who leave their parents' homes subsequently return. Data from the (U.S.) National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 are used to study young adults' returns to the parental home, to test hypotheses about the influences on these residential decisions and to examine the likely causes of the increases in returning home in recent years. Our conceptual framework considers returning home in terms of the costs and benefits of separate residence; it also considers the relative youth of those now living away from home, and the high density of ‘normal’ transitions in their lives, as well as their continued dependency in many ways on their parents. We find returns home not only to be associated with ‘failure’ transitions, such as losing a job or ending a marriage, but also to follow the completion of such transitional roles as student and military service. They occur as well in conjunction with the role changes, such as returning to school or beginning full-time work. Thus returning home appears to be more common, and more ordinary, in the life course, now that more of those young adults away from home are unmarried, than was the case when most young adults who lived away from home were married. With the development of pre-marital residential independence for a large segment of young adults, the parental home becomes not only a ‘safety net’ for those who have run into unexpected twists on the road to independence, but also a ‘home base’ to return to while encountering many of the often frequent changes that occur early in adult life.