For the price of one square metre of housing in Madrid, you can buy almost two in central Mexico City and nearly three in Buenos Aires, Bogotá or São Paulo. But higher property prices do not necessarily mean a heavier burden on local wages. The key question is how much of their income locals need to spend to afford a home.
If you compare rents with wages, the gap shrinks and in some cases even flips. In the Madrid region, renting an 80-square-metre flat at December 2025 asking prices would have absorbed 71% of the average gross salary advertised on InfoJobs that year, according to a study by Fotocasa and InfoJobs. In Buenos Aires, a two-room apartment comes to almost 80% of an average worker's income.
And in parts of the Santiago metropolitan area, anyone on the minimum wage can end up spending between 78% and 96% of their take-home pay on the rent for a small flat. These measures illustrate the pressure on incomes, although differences in flat sizes, geographical coverage and wage definitions mean they are not directly comparable. A commonly used affordability benchmark is to spend no more than 30% of income on rent.
Taking Spain's modal salary (the most frequently recorded salary, rather than the average), which was €16,520 in 2024, and dividing it by 12 gives approximately €1,377 a month before tax. Applying that benchmark leaves about €413 a month for rent. At that price, searches on housing portals found nothing available in Madrid.
The closest option was €500 for a flat of barely 30 square metres. The exercise produces virtually the same result in Barcelona. For €500, you can find somewhere noticeably larger than in the national capital, but the search returned just three homes.
Existing homes in Madrid were advertised at an average of €6,471 per square metre in August, according to property website Idealista. This is 2.2% more than a year earlier and below the April peak of €6,619. The slowdown has not reached the cheapest districts: in Villaverde, the borough with the most affordable homes per square metre, prices have jumped 25% in a year.
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