It’s no secret that housing is expensive in the UK. Whether you’re trying to buy or rent, finding a place to live in this country is often a time-consuming, soul-crushing task which will inevitably eat up most of your paycheck. Not everywhere is as pricey as London, though. In fact, there’s actually one part of England which was recently named one of the most affordable places to live in the world.
Yep, in the world. How do we know this? It’s all detailed in the 2025 edition of the Demographia International Housing Affordability (DIHA) report. Catchy name, we know. The study was conducted by the centre for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in LA and a Canadian thinktank called the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP). The DIHA is now in its 21st year of life and has, according to its authors, ‘robustly documented the deterioration of housing affordability’.
Median price-to-income ratio was used to determine exactly how affordable an area was. This basically means the DIHA compared house prices to incomes, working out how many times you have to multiply the median salary in order to afford the median house price.
The DIHA painted a pretty bleak picture overall, but there are some spots where homes remain within reach, one of which is in the north of England. Middlesbrough & Durham was named the fifth most affordable housing market in the world, also meaning that it tops the UK chart. It had a ‘median multiple’ of 3.7, only 0.5 points above the city which came first overall: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
To put that in context, anything below 3.0 is considered ‘affordable’, and anything 3.1 to 4.0 is labelled ‘moderately unaffordable’. The fact that even the top ranking locales all score above 3 goes to show just how unstable housing really is at the moment.
Sheffield was named the UK’s second best housing market, sitting at 3.8, just below Middlesbrough & Durham. The jump to third place was much more noticeable, not least because it was a four way tie between Nottingham, Stoke on Trent & Staffordshire, Glasgow, and Derby & Derbyshire. They all sat comfortably within the ‘seriously unaffordable range’ at 4.6.
The study also said that London, which was unsurprisingly the UK’s least affordable place to live, scored more than double Middlesbrough & Durham, coming in at 9.1. This puts it in the ‘impossibly unaffordable’ category. We’ll sure Londoners will agree with that assessment.
You can check out the DIHA report for yourself here.
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