If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you might’ve seen that in order to buy a house in one London borough, you apparently need to be earning a whopping £200,000 a year.
That’s the price for Kensington, currently the most expensive part of the capital, but even the more ‘affordable’ boroughs require you to be making nearly six figures a year. For most of us that is quite simply never going to happen, so more and more young people are looking to settle elsewhere.
If you’re considering your options, Deloitte has just published its 2025 Property Index, a huge paper which analysed the affordability of housing in dozens of major cities across the whole of Europe. The goal is to discover exactly where in the continent people can still afford to buy homes, giving economists key insights and consumers more information about where they might like to live.
In order to measure affordability, Deloitte calculated how many times you would need to make the average salary in order to purchase a bog-standard 70 square-metre new-build flat. For instance, if a flat cost £10, and the average salary was £2, you’d get a score of five. Pretty simple.
Turin was found to be the most affordable city in Europe, with the average person only needing to fork out their salary 4.9 times in order to bag a home. The lowest scoring UK city, however, wasn’t far behind.
The third most affordable city in Europe is right here in the UK: in Manchester flats only cost, on average, 5.3 times the standard salary. For comparison in inner London, that number jumps to 10.8. When you consider that salaries are much higher in London, you really get a picture of just how expensive property is in the capital.
Manchester doesn’t fare so well in the rental market, where you’re likely to be charged €16.40 (£14.20) per square metre. For comparison, the cheapest city to rent was Durrës in Albania, where that cost comes down to €4.90 (£4.20). This suggests that flats in Manchester are smaller than other places in Europe, or that there is a particularly high-demand for rentals.
The most expensive city in the study to buy in was Amsterdam, where house prices are 15.4 times higher than the average salary – you can read more about the continent’s most expensive property prices on Time Out now. Alternatively, have a look through Deloitte’s full Property Index for some future home inspo.
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