An estate portal study shows the average wage share has risen 12 percentage points since 2019. Madrid and Catalonia, with 70% of pay, top the regional ranking.
The evidence of the housing crisis Spain is going through is plain for all to see. In the rental market, the cumulative increase since 2022 is around 30%, according to the CIS, while housing construction - PwC data -has been at rock-bottom levels since 2010, with an average of 83,000 homes a year compared with 315,000 on average between 1970 and 2010. In addition, the stock of public housing is clearly inadequate, according to the Bank of Spain: between 1.5% and 3.3% of the total, compared with an EU average of 9.3%.
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Warning voices are now even being raised from within the property sector itself, which has faced heavy criticism from platforms such as the Tenants' Union for failing to take firm action against vulture funds or against evictions of vulnerable people. The property portal Fotocasa, which acts as an intermediary for sales and rentals, estimates that Spaniards who rent their homes spent on average 50% of their salary on rent in 2025.
These figures, calculated using the average advertised salaries in job offers posted on the InfoJobs platform - a snapshot that is not very realistic - are higher than those found in similar studies. The Funcas think-tank (source in Spanish) believes that young people, one of the hardest-hit groups, spend around 35% of their budget: still two percentage points above the maximum economists usually recommend for such costs, that is, a third of income at most.
Fotocasa calculates that the share of the average salary going on rent rose from 38% in 2019 to 50% in 2025, while also taking account of disparities between Spain's regions: from the 29% it estimates for residents in Extremadura to 71% for those living in Madrid. The pattern is similar across the rest of the ranking of autonomous communities, with residents in the usual suspects, the Basque Country, the Canary and Balearic Islands, Catalonia and the Valencia region, paying the most.
By contrast, the provinces whose residents devote the smallest share of their gross pay to rent are Jaén (23%), Teruel (25%), Cáceres (27%), Ciudad Real (28%), Albacete (29%), Ourense (29%), Badajoz (29%), Córdoba (29%), Palencia (30%) and Castellón (31%).
