How many years of salary does a flat cost?

How long would you have to work to buy a new two-bedroom flat, if you spent every euro you earned on it? In Prague, almost 17 years. In Turin, less than five.

Those figures come from Deloitte’s Property Index, which compares the price of a new 70 m² flat with the average gross salary in 49 European cities. The ratio is crude: nobody spends their whole salary on housing, and buyers borrow. But it is a fair way to compare how far out of reach a home is from one city to the next.

Not just a capital-city problem

It is tempting to blame capitals, and in some countries that works: Patras, in Greece, needs 8.8 years of pay against Athens’ 16.0. But Central Europe breaks the pattern. In Czechia, Brno (15.0 years) and Ostrava (14.1) are nearly as unaffordable as Prague; in Slovakia, Košice (15.0) and Banská Bystrica (13.4) are less affordable than Bratislava (13.7). There, the problem is national: new-build prices have risen far faster than wages almost everywhere.

At the other end, Danish and Italian cities such as Aarhus, Odense and Turin need around five years, because wages are high relative to what new flats cost.

Prices have outrun pay

Across the EU, the problem has been building for over a decade. Between 2010 and 2024, house prices in the EU rose by about 53%, according to Eurostat’s house price index. The average full-time salary rose by about 46%. A home that took ten years of pay in 2010 took about ten and a half in 2024, before counting interest rates.

And prices haven’t stopped. In the second quarter of 2026 they were 4.7% higher than a year earlier across the EU, while rents rose 3.0%. On that year-on-year basis, Portugal (+16.5%), Bulgaria (+15.5%) and Lithuania (+14.3%) led; Finland, Luxembourg and France saw prices fall.

Malta: faster prices, faster pay

Malta isn’t in Deloitte’s index, so there is no like-for-like years-of-salary figure. But Eurostat’s data tell a surprising story. Between 2010 and 2024, Maltese house prices rose about 80%, much faster than the EU’s 53%. Average salaries rose about 82%, faster still.

In other words, measured against average pay, Maltese housing was no less affordable in 2024 than in 2010. The answer depends on the starting point, though. Measured from 2005, Maltese house prices rose about 180% and average pay about 124%, so a home costs roughly a quarter more years of pay than it did then. The years just before 2008 were when Malta’s prices ran furthest ahead of incomes; since 2010 they have moved together.

That may not last. Prices rose 6.9% in the year to the second quarter of 2026 (provisional), well above the EU average, and apartments led the NSO’s index in the first quarter, up 6.9% against 5.3% for maisonettes. An average also hides who is buying: a first-time buyer on a starting salary is a long way from the average earner. That is a question for a future issue.