At least three elements have increased since 2015: the number of tenants, the price of rent and households who go overboard to pay it. The rise in prices has increased the difficulties of finding affordable housing, the main demand of the organizers of the demonstrations which will travel through Madrid and Barcelona on October 13, in addition to the calls planned in the coming weeks in other cities of the country. Between 2015 and 2022, rents, both inside and outside the capital, increased by an average of 30% in each of the streets and neighborhoods of Spanish cities.
How much has the rent increased in your street? In the following map you can see the increase in median rent prices between 2015 and 2022 in each census section of most Spanish cities. How much darker is the color, the more rents have increased.
Source: Ministry of the Interior
The data comes from the National Reference System for Housing Rental Prices, which includes usual residence rents declared for Personal Income Tax (IRPF) crossed with the information available for each property in the database of the Cadastre.
In total, for 2022, the latest year for which data is available, the figures are based on the statements of nearly two million apartments rented by individuals which were declared to the Tax Agency in the common tax territory . Therefore, housing rented in the informal economy, housing rented by businesses and businesses, as well as properties located or declared by residents of the provincial territories of Euskadi or Navarra are excluded from the statistics. These figures do not include price increases produced in 2023 and 2024, since the data used comes from personal income tax returns and is published two years late.
If ten years ago you paid 500 euros for an apartment in a Spanish city, it is very likely that today you would pay around 650 euros for rent in the same area. If you paid 800 for it, it will probably now cost you more than 1000 euros.
The figures show how rising rental prices are being repeated across the country. In Madrid and Barcelona, tenants pay around 200 euros more each month. That’s an increase of 30%. But the increase in rental prices is not limited to large cities and is even stronger on the Mediterranean coast. In the Balearic Islands, Valencia and Malaga, rents have increased by an average of 40%. Other coastal areas like Santa Cruz de Tenerife (+33%), Alicante (+32%) and Murcia (+29%) or areas surrounding Madrid, like Toledo (+35%) or Guadalajara (+31%). The effect also spread inside. In cities like Seville, Ávila and Huesca, the price increase is already, in percentage terms, like that of the Madrid capital, 30%.
