Spain: Having a Job Is No Longer Enough to Afford a Home

Spain's housing crisis has deepened to the point where employment alone can no longer guarantee a roof over one's head. Between 2015 and 2025, home prices surged 84.6% while average annual gross wages rose only 27.85%, reaching 29,540 euros by 2024. That gap is still widening: in the second quarter of 2026, housing prices climbed 12.2% year-on-year against wage growth of just 3–4%. A recent Oxfam Intermón study found that 15.49% of working people — around 770,000 — now live in in-work poverty, with one in three working renters (34.08%) falling below the poverty line after paying rent. By contrast, the rate stands at 10.22% among mortgage holders and 7.95% among outright owners. According to the Bank of Spain, four in ten rented households spend more than 40% of their income on housing. Supply is a structural driver of the crisis: between 2021 and 2025 a deficit of roughly 750,000 homes accumulated, and in 2025 some 225,000 new households formed while only around 92,000 homes were completed. With an average home price of about €200,000, buyers need roughly €60,000 upfront to cover the deposit and purchase costs — a sum that becomes nearly impossible to save while paying high rent. Economist Rafael Pampillón of San Pablo-CEU University warns that "having money for the deposit is not enough." Unions CC.OO. and UGT have called a general strike for 11 November and are demanding at least a 7% rise in the statutory minimum wage in 2027, though experts across the spectrum agree that wage increases alone cannot solve a problem that is fundamentally about housing supply.