UK Mortgage Affordability Map

The ratio of median house price to median local salary has risen sharply in the South East since 2000, while wages have lagged behind. Our UK mortgage affordability map shades every UK region by how many years of an average local salary it takes to buy an average local home, and lets you set your own mortgage rate, deposit, and term to see the breakdown for any region you click.

The number that comes out is uncomfortable, and it is meant to be. You can argue with house prices. You can argue with wages. You cannot really argue with the ratio between the two.

Contents

• What "Affordability" Means as a Multiple
• The 2026 Picture by Region
• How to Use the Map
• Why the Map Looks Like This
• What the Multiple Quietly Ignores
• Frequently Asked Questions

What "Affordability" Means as a Multiple

The ONS publishes an annual series called the ratio of median house price to median gross annual workplace earnings, broken down by local authority. That ratio is the spine of this map. A region with a ratio of 8.0x means the median home costs eight years of the median full-time pre-tax salary for someone working in that area.

Two important details about that denominator. First, it is median full-time gross earnings, which excludes part-time workers, the self-employed, and people not in employment. That tilts the wage figure upward and makes the headline ratio look more reachable than it is for the typical worker. Second, it is workplace earnings, not residence earnings. London's salary figure is inflated by City commuters earning their wage in Zone 1 and spending it in Surrey, which makes inner London look slightly less unaffordable than it would if you used what the people who actually live there earn.

Even with those caveats baked in, the ratio is the cleanest like-for-like number we have. The Bank of England uses it. The Office for Budget Responsibility uses it. Most Treasury debates about the housing market have to reckon with it in some form. Most mainstream UK lenders cap residential mortgages at around 4.5x salary, which means any region with a ratio above roughly 5x is one where the average single earner is unlikely to be able to buy the average home with a mortgage alone. Much of England now sits above that threshold on the ONS figures. This is general information rather than mortgage advice - if you are weighing up a specific purchase, talk to a regulated mortgage broker.

The 2026 Picture by Region

Click into any region on the map for the live numbers. The rough 2026 shape, based on recent ONS releases (check the map for the latest published figures), tends to look something like this:

• London: typically in the low-to-mid teens. Some inner boroughs push higher still at the individual borough level.
• South East (Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Berkshire): around 9-11x.
• East of England (Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Essex): around 8-10x.
• South West: around 8-9x, with Cornwall, Devon, and the Cotswolds pulling the regional figure up.
• West Midlands: around 6-7x.
• East Midlands: around 6-7x.
• North West: around 5-6x.
• Yorkshire and the Humber: around 5-6x.
• Wales: around 5-6x.
• Scotland: around 4-5x.
• North East: around 4-5x. Often the most affordable mainland region on this measure.
• Northern Ireland: around 5-6x.

The story since 2000 is a divergence, not a uniform climb. Northern regions have drifted up by a couple of multiples. The South East and London have risen far more sharply. Median UK full-time gross earnings in recent ONS ASHE releases have been broadly in the high £30,000s. A 10x region implies a roughly £370,000-£400,000 median home, which is in the ballpark of the entry-level terraced market in Surrey or the median flat in inner London. A 5x region implies a roughly £185,000-£200,000 home, broadly in line with median terraced housing in Sheffield or Sunderland on recent Land Registry data.

How to Use the Map

The four inputs across the top of the map page drive every number in the side panel and the ranked table below it.

• Mortgage rate. Defaults to the Bank of England's published average quoted rate on a new 2-year fix at 75% LTV, refreshed daily. The BoE base rate and typical 5-year fix figures sit in a similar band in mid-2026, but check the Bank of England's website for current figures. If you are looking at a 90% or 95% LTV product, you would typically need to override the rate upward by a few tenths of a percentage point to match higher-LTV pricing.
• Deposit. Defaults to 10%. Drop it to 5% to model a first-time buyer scheme like the Bank of Mum and Dad's least favourite option, or raise it to 25% to see how the monthly payment collapses when you cross the LTV cliff at 75%.
• Term. Defaults to 25 years. Push it to 35 or 40 to see what the "more affordable" headline figure for a longer mortgage actually buys you in monthly cashflow. Our 40-year UK mortgages piece has the full trade-off.
• Savings rate. What share of post-tax income goes into the deposit pot each year. Drives the years to save deposit number in the side panel.

Click any region on the map (or any row in the ranked table) and the side panel updates with the median price, median local salary, deposit required, monthly payment, and the percentage of take-home pay that payment swallows. Above 30% is amber. Above 40% is red. Most of the South sits in red at a 10% deposit.

If you want a single-property view rather than a regional one, our house affordability calculator lets you plug in a specific price. Pair it with the mortgage calculator for the exact payment schedule and the stamp duty calculator for the upfront tax hit.

Why the Map Looks Like This

Three structural forces drive the regional divide, and none of them are about how careful with money any individual buyer has been.

Planning constraints. England has historically built fewer homes per capita than many comparable European economies, according to ONS and OECD housing data. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 made every new home a discretionary political decision, and decades of green belt expansion and restrictive local plans have, on most independent analyses, constrained supply most tightly in the very areas with the strongest demand. The South East is heavily affected because it is where the demand is and where the green belt is densest.

Buy-to-let stock concentration. A meaningful share of English homes - around one in five on recent English Housing Survey figures - is now privately rented, and the ownership of those rentals is unevenly distributed. Landlords often compete with first-time buyers for similar stock at the lower end of the market. Many bid in cash, accept lower yields, and treat the home as a financial asset rather than a place to live. That bid pressure is one of the reasons cited by housing economists for the lower end of the market rising faster than the middle since 2010.

Wages have not kept up. UK real wages have been broadly flat since 2008 on ONS earnings data, with Resolution Foundation analysis describing the 2010s as one of the worst pay stagnations on record. Even if house prices had stopped rising in 2008, the affordability ratio would have worsened simply because the denominator stopped growing. Our why boomers had it easier piece walks through the generational maths.

The honest summary: housing in much of the South of England looks structurally hard to reach for the average wage, and no calculator changes that. The map is a diagnostic, not advice. What you do with the information - whether that means relocating, waiting, saving harder, or talking to a regulated mortgage adviser about joint applications and family contributions - is a personal decision that depends on your circumstances.

What the Multiple Quietly Ignores

The headline ratio is a useful number but it overstates how reachable houses are for the typical first-time buyer. Three big distortions sit underneath it.

Dual-income households are the real benchmark. A large share of modern first-time-buyer purchases in the South are joint, and most mainstream lenders will lend up to roughly 4.5x joint income. A couple each earning the median full-time salary can in principle borrow around twice what a single applicant can. A market in the low double digits on the single-earner ratio may be reachable for a dual-income couple with help on the deposit, while looking out of reach for a single earner without help. The map shows the single-earner picture because that is the cleanest comparison across regions; in practice many first-time buyers are buying as couples.

Parental help is now common, not exceptional. A meaningful share of UK first-time-buyer deposits - estimated by Legal & General's "Bank of Mum and Dad" research to be roughly half in some surveys - involves a gift or loan from family. Whatever the precise share, the "Bank of Mum and Dad" is consistently cited as one of the largest informal sources of housing finance in the country, and it has reinforced the gap between people whose parents own property and people whose parents do not. The ratio assumes the buyer saves the deposit. Many do not, or not entirely.

The salary figure excludes the people who are most squeezed. ASHE counts full-time employees only. Part-time workers, the self-employed, gig workers, and people moving between jobs are not in the denominator. A significant share of the UK workforce is self-employed (around 4-5 million people on recent ONS labour-market figures) and another large slice is part-time. For those workers, the real affordability multiple is likely worse than the map shows.

Put those three together and the map is the optimistic version of the picture. If anything looks unaffordable on the headline ratio, it is more unaffordable than that for most actual buyers.

Related Reading

• UK mortgage types in 2026 - fixed vs tracker vs offset, and which fits which household.
• Why boomers had it easier - the generational maths behind the regional divide.
• House affordability calculator - single-property view of the same question.
• Stamp duty calculator - the upfront tax on top of the headline price.
• Mortgage calculator - full payment schedule for any rate, term, and loan.