Top 100 Cities by Housing Affordability (Price-to-Income Ratio), 2025

Reading the price-to-income ratio in cities (2025 snapshot)

The price-to-income ratio compares a typical home price in a city to a typical annual household income. It is commonly read as “how many years of income” it would take to buy a typical home in that city. Lower values imply greater affordability; higher values imply that ownership is more disconnected from local earnings.

Top 10 least affordable cities by price-to-income ratio (2025)

The Top 10 is concentrated in Asian and adjacent urban markets where ownership prices have run well ahead of locally earned income. The drivers are not identical across these cities: in mainland Chinese metros the ratio reflects years of strong price appreciation in tier-one and tier-two markets; in places such as Hong Kong SAR and Seoul, land scarcity and dense job concentration matter more; and in South and Southeast Asian capitals the ratio often reflects the combination of fast urban demand growth and weaker income purchasing power.

Table 1 — Top 10 least affordable cities (2025)

Chart 1 — Top 10 least affordable cities (higher ratio = less affordable)

What tends to push the ratio higher

A city usually moves into a high-ratio zone when home prices compound faster than household earnings for several years in a row. That often happens where new supply is slow to respond, buildable land is scarce, or the most attractive job districts keep concentrating demand in a limited part of the urban area. In practical terms, home prices can adjust much faster than wages.

The same headline ratio can still come from different underlying stories. In some cities the main driver is chronic land and planning constraint; in others it is tourism pressure, investor demand, inflation, weak income purchasing power, or a strong split between buyers priced off global capital and residents paid from the local labour market. That is why the ratio is a useful warning signal, but not a complete explanation on its own.

Methodology

There is no single official global statistical table that publishes a harmonised city-level price-to-income ratio for 100 urban markets. For this 2025 snapshot, the ranking uses Numbeo’s Property Prices Index by City and specifically its Price to Income Ratio field. Numbeo states that this indicator is calculated as median apartment price divided by median family disposable income, expressed as years of income. Its published assumptions are important: family disposable income is set at 1.5 × the average net salary, the representative apartment size is 90 square metres, and the dwelling price is based on the average of price per square metre in the city centre and outside the centre.

That construction makes the ranking useful as a fast cross-city screening indicator, but not as a fully standardised official affordability scoreboard. Numbeo is a crowdsourced, continuously updated database, which means coverage depends on where enough user-reported observations exist and where the price inputs are refreshed often enough to produce a current city reading. As a result, this Top 100 should be read as a ranking of the least affordable cities within the covered snapshot, not as a literal census of every urban housing market in the world.

The ratio also has structural limits. It does not incorporate mortgage rates, loan-to-value rules, taxes, transaction costs, down-payment constraints, inherited wealth, household size differences, or rent regulation. Nor does it tell us whether a city is becoming more or less affordable over time. For interpretation, it works best when paired with official house price series, income data, rent burdens and housing-cost-over-income indicators from national or international statistical sources.

Insights from the Top 100 distribution

The middle of the Top 100 matters more than the headline extreme. In this list, 57 cities fall between 13× and 17×, while 28 cities sit at 20× or above. That split helps distinguish two different affordability problems: a broad group of cities where ownership is already heavily stretched relative to incomes, and a smaller but much more severe tier where the disconnect has become extreme.

The regional composition is not random. Asia dominates the hardest end of the ranking, with a Top-100 regional median near 27.3×. That reflects a mix of dense megacity land constraints, strong ownership demand and, in several markets, price appreciation that has outpaced earnings for years. Europe, with a median near 15.2× in this Top 100 set, looks less extreme overall, but its stressed cities are concentrated in tourism-heavy, capital-city or supply-constrained markets such as Lisbon, London, Prague, Athens and several South-East and Eastern European cities. The Americas, with a median around 16.0×, combine large Latin American metros where local incomes struggle to keep up with asset prices and a smaller number of North American markets where housing is expensive in absolute terms but supported by higher earnings.

The MENA entries illustrate yet another pattern: affordability pressure can come not only from classic “superstar city” dynamics, but also from inflation, currency instability, weak supply elasticity or a heavy concentration of demand in a limited number of urban hubs. These regional medians should still be interpreted carefully. They are medians within this stressed Top 100 subset, not medians for all cities in each region.

What this means for readers

For relocation planning, the ratio is a fast way to anticipate whether housing will be the dominant cost pressure. A city can be expensive in absolute terms yet relatively manageable if incomes are also high; conversely, a city with lower headline prices can be less affordable if typical earnings are much lower.

For household budgeting, a high ratio often translates into higher leverage needs, longer saving horizons, or heavier reliance on transfers and family support. For market monitoring, a persistently elevated ratio can point to structural scarcity and greater sensitivity to interest-rate shocks.

FAQ

Is a lower price-to-income ratio always “better”?

Lower ratios generally imply greater affordability, but they do not automatically mean higher quality of life. Cities with low ratios can still have high rent burdens, long commutes, weaker job markets, or limited housing quality. Use the ratio as one input, not a full scorecard.

Why can some cities look extreme even if prices have cooled recently?

Ratios can stay high when incomes lag behind prices over long periods. Even if prices stop rising, affordability may not improve quickly unless incomes catch up or housing supply expands enough to ease price pressure.

Does the ratio reflect mortgages and interest rates?

No. The ratio compares price levels to income levels. It does not include mortgage rates, down payments, taxes, or borrowing constraints, all of which can meaningfully change the lived affordability of buying.

Why can two cities with similar prices have very different ratios?

Because incomes differ. A similar home price can be far more affordable in a city where typical household earnings are higher. That’s why the ratio is often more informative than prices alone for cross-city comparison.

What ratio is often treated as “affordable” in simple frameworks?

A common plain-language benchmark is around 3× annual income, but thresholds vary by country and reporting framework. Many cities in this Top 100 list are far above that level, which helps explain persistent affordability debates.

Should renters care about the price-to-income ratio?

Yes, indirectly. High ownership price-to-income ratios often coexist with broader housing scarcity and pressure on rents, though the strength of the link depends on local regulation, construction pipelines, and tenure structure.

Table 2 — Top 100 least affordable cities by price-to-income ratio, 2025

This table lists the Top 100 least affordable cities in the 2025 snapshot, ordered from the highest price-to-income ratio (Rank 1) to the lowest ratio within this Top 100 list (Rank 100).

The ranking should be read as a covered-market snapshot, not as a complete inventory of every urban housing market. A city appears here because it is present in the source dataset with a current ratio value. That makes the table useful for comparison, but it also means coverage is part of the story.

Chart 2 — Histogram of price-to-income ratios (Top 100, 2025)

Each bar counts how many cities fall into a ratio range. A long right tail means that a small set of extreme markets can dominate headlines even if many cities cluster in the mid-to-high teens.

Histogram bins (count of cities):

Ratio range	Count
13–15×	35
15–17×	22
17–19×	13
19–21×	4
21–23×	5
23–25×	5
25–27×	2
27–29×	6
29–31×	2
31–33×	1
33–35×	3
35–37×	1
≥ 37×	1

Bins use 2× steps for readability. Counts sum to 100.

Chart 3 — Median price-to-income ratio by region (Top 100, 2025)

Bars show regional medians computed from the Top 100 list. Medians reduce the influence of extreme outliers and help indicate whether affordability stress is concentrated in a few outlier cities or is widespread across a region within this Top 100 set.

Regional medians within the Top 100 list:

Region	Median	n
Asia	27.3×	25
Europe	15.2×	43
Americas	16.0×	20
MENA	18.6×	10
Africa	17.1×	1
Oceania	13.0×	1

Regional medians are calculated only from the cities that appear in this Top 100 ranking.

Interpretation: what the 2025 city ranking suggests

Last updated: April 20, 2026.

The 2025 list does not point to a single global affordability story. Asian megacities dominate the top because they combine dense employment concentration with long-running price escalation and, in several cases, severe land or planning constraints. Southern and Eastern European cities appear for a different mix of reasons: tourism pressure, capital-city concentration, a limited pipeline of new supply, and price growth that has often run faster than local wages. In Latin American cities, the ratio often reflects a weaker local income base relative to formal-sector housing prices, while several MENA markets combine inflation or macro instability with supply bottlenecks and demand concentrated in a few major urban centres.

The broader lesson is that a high price-to-income ratio is not, by itself, a diagnosis. It tells you that ownership prices are far above locally earned income, but it does not tell you whether the main driver is land scarcity, financial conditions, investor demand, tourism, weak income growth, or a particular housing-finance structure. That is why the ratio works best as a first filter and worst as a stand-alone explanation.

Analytical takeaway: what a high ratio usually signals

Primary sources and technical notes