Spain has a housing problem that has been getting worse for years and has already changed the way its young people think about their future. Buying a flat in Madrid, Barcelona or Málaga is, for most people under 40, a mission impossible. Renting on your own is no more viable: those who move out alone devote on average 98.7% of their salary to housing.
The result is a generation that feels trapped: only 14.5% of young people aged 16 to 29 have managed to move out, and the average age for leaving the parental home has risen to 30, compared with 26 in the European Union. According to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), 44.3% of young people aged 26 to 34 were still living in the family home in 2025.
The previous generation was able to buy flats, cars and even second homes on an average wage. Today that is a pipe dream. With a shortage of housing and strong demand, purchase prices rose by 14.7% year on year in the past 12 months and rents by 10.9%, according to Bankinter, while wages for under-35s have barely grown in real terms.
On top of this comes the overcrowding of cities, which have become urban spaces hosting more people than they can cope with, with high levels of pollution and where it is impossible to find the rest and disconnection that still exist in the countryside. For all these reasons, more and more young people are swapping cities for depopulated villages where buying a home has not yet become an unattainable luxury.
