People in Great Britain spend more than half of their take-home pay on rent, as wages fail to keep up with soaring prices.
It cost £1,246 a month on average to rent a home in Britain in the year to March 2024.
That’s up by 9.1 percent compared to the same time last year, and by 34.8 percent since March 2015, when the average home cost £924 a month to rent.
Meanwhile, the average full-time employee earned an estimated £27,825 last year after tax and national insurance were deducted.
That’s up by 23.1 percent from 2014, when the average take-home pay was £22,597 for full-time workers.That’s almost 12 percentage points less than rents have increased by in that time.
This means that renting the average British home now costs 53.7 percent of the typical take-home pay, up from 49.1 percent back in 2015.
You can see how rent affordability has changed over time in our region as well as in other parts of the country by using our interactive map.
The figures come from exclusive analysis of official earnings and rent price data by the Reach Data Unit.
Take-home pay has been calculated by deducting income tax and national insurance from the median salary in each local authority, for each year from 2014 to 2023.
Bristol has seen the biggest increase of rent unaffordability in the country.
The cost of renting in the city has increased at more than twice the rate of full-time salaries.
It costs £1,748 a month to rent the average home in Bristol in the 12 months to March 2024. That’s 64.6 percent more than in March 2015.
Take-home pay, meanwhile, has increased by 28.2 percent to an average of £28,288.
It means that renting the average home costs 74.2 percent of the typical take-home wage, making Bristol one of the least affordable places to rent in the country.
The most unaffordable places to rent are all in London.
The average cost of renting a home in Westminster works out as 91.6 percent of the average take-home pay.
Average rents in Camden account for 85.9 percent of the average take-home pay. In Hammersmith and Fulham the ratio is 85.3 percent, in Islington it’s 84.2 percent, and in Hackney it’s 82.0 percent.
