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A widely used marker of affordability when it comes to living costs is whether you spend 30 percent or less of your salary on your rent, and according to brand-new research by British finance journal The Economist, only eight major European cities can be deemed ‘affordable’.
For the second year, the publication has conducted research and produced a European ‘Carrie Bradshaw Index’. To do this, it used the latest rents for one-bedroom flats (based on Eurostats data), and calculated how much locals would need to earn to spend a maximum of 30 percent of their salary on it.
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Each major European city was given a ‘Bradshaw score’, and only eight of the hubs analysed scored more than 1, deeming them affordable. The most budget-friendly city? That’d be Bonn, a city in western Germany that straddles the Rhine River, which scores 1.33 on the index.
Lyon followed closely behind, and Bern, Brussels and Helsinki round out the top five. In eighth place, and scraping its way into the affordable category with a score of 1.01 was the German capital of Berlin. The average salary here is €55,000 (around £47,500), which comfortably covers a monthly rent of €1,350.
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- Bonn
- Lyon
- Bern
- Brussels
- Helsinki
- Vienna
- Luxembourg
- Berlin
At the other end of the scale, London, Geneva, and Stockholm ranked as some of the least affordable cities in Europe, but head to The Economist’s article for more information and some fun graphs.
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