MADRID — Buying a home in Spain has never been harder. A worker in 2025 needed the equivalent of 8.4 years of their full gross salary to purchase an 80-square-metre second-hand property, according to a joint study by property platform Fotocasa and jobs site InfoJobs the worst affordability figure ever recorded in the country.
The deterioration over a single year was sharp. In 2024, the same calculation stood at 7.1 years. By the end of 2025, it had jumped to 8.4 years an increase of 16 months’ pay in 12 months, driven almost entirely by a collapse in the relationship between wages and property prices.
While advertised wages rose by just 1% across 2025, the price of second-hand housing surged 20.5%, reaching an average of €2,879 per square metre nationally.
The gap between the two figures is not a market fluctuation. It is, researchers say, the structural driver of a crisis that is now measurably the worst in Spain’s recorded housing history.
“Spain is going through the worst housing affordability crisis in its history. Never before have citizens had to put so many years of pay towards buying a home,” said María Matos, Head of Research and spokesperson for Fotocasa.
The Balearics and Madrid Lead the Affordability Collapse
Regional disparities are extreme and widening. The Balearic Islands are the hardest place in Spain to buy a home, where residents must devote 15.1 years of gross salary — equivalent to 181 monthly pay packets — to purchase an average property. The islands have long been under pressure from tourism-driven demand and a constrained housing supply, and the 2025 figures confirm that dynamic has intensified further.
Madrid is close behind at 15 years’ salary required, but it is the region where conditions deteriorated most dramatically over the year.
The effort required to buy in the capital increased by 34 months compared with 2024 the largest single-year deterioration of any Spanish region and a figure that reflects the pace at which Madrid’s property market has accelerated beyond the reach of ordinary workers.
The Canary Islands and the Basque Country also exceed ten years of salary effort, while Catalonia is approaching that threshold at 9.4 years. These are regions where decades of underbuilding, population growth, and sustained demand from domestic and international buyers have pushed prices beyond what local wages can support.
Pockets of Affordability Remain, but They Are Shrinking
Not all of Spain is equally unaffordable. At the other end of the scale, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura require around four years of gross salary to buy a home — conditions that remain broadly manageable by comparison. Jaén is the most affordable province in the country, where residents need just three years of gross salary for an 80-square-metre property.
Ciudad Real, Teruel, Toledo, Zamora, and Ávila also stand out for relative affordability, with effort requirements remaining below four years. Across Spain as a whole, only 17 provinces allow a home to be purchased by dedicating less than five full years of gross pay a figure that underscores how narrowly concentrated genuine affordability now is.
The authors of the Fotocasa and InfoJobs report are explicit about what is driving the divergence between affordable and unaffordable markets. It is not primarily a question of local economic conditions. It is the speed at which property prices are rising relative to wages in high-demand urban and coastal areas, pulling those markets permanently out of reach for workers on ordinary incomes.
Wages Cannot Close the Gap
The 1% wage growth recorded across Spain in 2025 is the central problem the report identifies. Property markets absorb wage increases quickly, but a 20.5% annual price surge of the kind recorded last year cannot be offset by income growth at any realistic rate.
“The 1% increase recorded in 2025 falls far short of the rise in house prices,” said Mónica Pérez, Director of Communications and Studies at InfoJobs. “This gap is forcing people to devote more and more years of work and savings to buying a home of their own.”
The study concludes that homeownership is gradually moving beyond the purchasing power of Spanish households, particularly in the most overheated markets, where the effort required to buy virtually doubles the national average. For workers in Madrid or the Balearic Islands, the arithmetic of homeownership has become, for many, simply impossible.
Spain’s housing affordability crisis sits within a broader European pattern. Portugal, Ireland, and the Netherlands have all recorded sustained deteriorations in the relationship between wages and property prices over the past decade, with low interest rates, institutional investment, and constrained supply repeatedly outpacing the capacity of governments to intervene effectively. In Spain, the 2025 figures suggest that dynamic is now accelerating rather than stabilising.
