Putting a roof over your head has become much more expensive across the European Union in the last ten years. The average price of a house went up by a crazy 53% between 2015 and 2024. In some countries, prices went up so much that they completely changed the way their property markets work. Prices have gone through the roof in several EU countries because of this rise, which was caused by things like rising building costs, mortgage rates, limited supply, and more people wanting to buy property as an investment.
Hungary has the most extreme price inflation. Since 2015, the cost of homes there has almost tripled. To get an apartment in Budapest, the country’s lively capital, you usually have to spend between €250,000 and a whopping €1.5 million. The next country in line is Iceland, which is not part of the EU but where home prices have gone up about 2.5 times since 2015. The most expensive areas are in the capital region, which includes Reykjavík and the towns around it. Prices there average around €558,000. The Bank of Iceland says that a drop in demand and a rise in supply have slowed the rate of price growth. However, year-on-year house price inflation was still a very high 8% in March.
In addition to these top countries, property prices have gone up a lot in a number of other European countries over the last nine years. During this time, house prices have more than doubled in Lithuania, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Poland. This is part of a larger trend of rising housing costs across Europe.
Finland, on the other hand, is an exception because home prices there have stayed mostly the same since almost ten years ago. However, this general stability hides big differences between regions. For example, the cost of living in rural areas is very different from that in Helsinki, the capital city. A new report from Global Property Guide says that the drop in the Finnish housing market that began in 2021 has probably hit its lowest point. As the economy is expected to get better, house prices will slowly go up, especially for newly built homes. On the other hand, prices for used homes will only go up a little this year. At the moment, the average price of a used apartment is about €4,612 per square meter, which works out to about €345,900 for a 75-square-meter apartment. In Helsinki, similar apartments could fetch prices between €400,000 and €500,000. Notably, Eurostat doesn’t have a lot of information on Greek house prices. However, the Bank of Greece says that prices for urban homes are only slightly higher than they were in 2008.
If you go outside of the EU, Turkey is an even worse example. Since 2015, house prices there have gone up an amazing 17 times. A two-bedroom flat in Istanbul now costs about €120,000 a year. Compared to prices in Western Europe, this may seem pretty cheap, but it’s important to remember that consumer prices have gone up almost 38% year-over-year and the average gross monthly salary is just over €600.
The rising cost of rent: a less dramatic but still important rise
In Europe, both house prices and rents have gone up a lot, though at a slower rate than house prices. The most recent information from Eurostat shows that rents in the EU went up by 26.7% from 2010 to the fourth quarter of 2024.
However, rental prices have gone up much more than this figure in some countries. Again, Estonia is in the lead because rental prices have more than tripled (+212%) since 2010 there. Rent prices in Iceland have gone up by 120%, and they’ve gone up 175% in Lithuania. Since 2010, rental prices in Hungary have gone up by more than 114%, or more than double. Greece is not following this trend; rental prices there are 13% lower now than they were during the same time last year. In the meantime, rental prices in Turkey have gone through the roof, reaching nearly 8.8 times what they were a decade ago, according to the most recent OECD figures.
Finding the EU’s most expensive places to live in terms of housing costs
In many EU member states, the total cost of living has also gone up a lot. This includes utilities as well as rent or mortgage payments. Estonians paid a little more than twice as much for housing in March 2025 as they did ten years earlier. This was the biggest rise in housing costs in the bloc. Then came Poland and the Czech Republic, where home prices were about 18% of what they were in 2015. During the same time period, these costs went up by more than 40% on average across the EU. Spain had the smallest rise in the group, just above 20%. Albania, which is trying to join the EU, had an even smaller rise.
Based on the most recent data from Eurostat, which comes from 2023, Ireland has the most expensive home compared to the rest of the EU. The prices in France and Germany were a little higher than the EU average. The prices in Italy and Spain were a little lower. In contrast, people in Malta and Hungary only paid about two-thirds of the EU average for housing. Bulgarians paid just under 40% of the EU average, which was the lowest of any country in the EU.
The high costs of rent and homes are making a big social problem worse: many young Europeans can’t leave their parents’ homes for years after they start working. Eurostat says that the average age at which young Europeans leave their parents’ home is 26.3 years. However, this age varies a lot between EU countries, from 21.4 years in Finland to 31.8 years in Croatia.
Where are most of the real estate investments?
Eurostat says that 8.6% of Cyprus’s GDP was invested in real estate in 2023, which was the biggest percentage of any country. With 7%, Italy came in third, just above Germany (6.9%) and France (6.4%). Poland (2.2% of GDP) and Greece (2.3% of GDP) had the lowest rates of real estate investment. As of 2023, the average amount of money spent on housing in the EU was 5.8% of GDP, or about 1 trillion euros.
The numbers make it very clear how much the European home markets have changed in the last ten years. Some places have seen prices rise very quickly, while others have seen prices stay about the same. Both buying and borrowing things are getting more expensive, which has big effects on how many people can afford to live and where they live, especially younger people. Policymakers and people alike need to understand these trends in order to make sense of how European housing is changing.
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