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Hong Kong’s property market is notoriously brutal, and the 2026 edition of the Demographia International Housing Affordability report has just served up a cold dose of reality by crowning us as the most financially gruelling place on earth to buy a home for a staggering 16th consecutive year.
Rating 95 major markets across eight nations in the third quarter of 2025, the study calculates housing affordability using the median multiple, a metric that compares local property prices to average household earnings. In a perfectly balanced world, a score under three indicates a healthy market, while anything climbing past nine lands straight into the impossibly unaffordable category. Our city is currently sitting well beyond that threshold with a score of 14.1, meaning local buyers would need to save 14.1 years of total gross income – assuming they spend zero dollars on expenses like food or electricity – just to buy a standard flat.
If there is any silver lining to be found, it’s that our score has actually fallen slightly from the 14.4 recorded last year, and a massive drop from our eye-watering peak of 23.2 back in 2021. This decline is largely driven by local private residential property prices slumping by over 20 percent from their historic highs. However, before anyone starts planning a property shopping spree, recent data indicates that home prices have already begun to creep back up this year, meaning this slight relief might be short-lived.
Our consistent reign over the global leaderboard comes down to limited land supply and exceptionally dense urban planning, which also leaves us with some of the smallest average home sizes on earth. There is a bit of hope on the horizon, though. Government initiatives could significantly boost our residential stock in the coming decades, as the Northern Metropolis project is slated to add more than 900,000 new housing units near the Shenzhen border, and the Lantau Tomorrow Vision project aims to provide more than 200,000 homes on reclaimed islands near Hong Kong International Airport.
On the opposite end of the global spectrum, the report highlights where your money goes the furthest. Cleveland (3.1) and Pittsburgh (3.2) in the United States secured the top two places, respectively, as the most affordable housing markets in the world, while four markets, including Edmonton, Canada, as well as Oklahoma City, Rochester, and St. Louis in the US, all tied in third place with a median multiple of 3.6.
For those curious about how the rest of the world fares, here’s the current lineup of the top 10 most unaffordable housing markets across the globe:
- Hong Kong (14.1)
- Sydney, Australia (14)
- San Jose, USA (11.3)
- Adelaide, Australia (11.2)
- Vancouver, Canada (10.8)
- Los Angeles, USA (10.7)
- Honolulu, USA (10.4)
- Brisbane, Australia (9.9)
- Melbourne, Australia (9.5)
- San Francisco, USA (9.4)
If you’re curious to learn more, check out this year’s Demographia International Housing Affordability report here.
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