Single first-time buyers in Ireland now need to earn more than €100,000 a year to afford a typical first home in three counties, highlighting the growing gap between house prices and wages.
Research by Chill Insurance found that a single buyer needs an annual income of €108,000 in Dublin, €101,250 in Wicklow and €100,238 in Kildare to secure a mortgage for a typical first-time buyer property.
Dublin was the only county where the required salary exceeded €100,000 a year ago. The latest figures show the affordability problem has now spread into surrounding counties.
The research also found that a single worker earning Ireland’s national median salary of €44,816 would not meet the income requirement for a typical first home in any of the country’s 26 counties.
Chill compared median first-time buyer property prices in each county with local median earnings data from the Central Statistics Office. The figures were then assessed against Central Bank mortgage rules, which generally allow buyers to borrow up to 90% of a property’s value and up to four times their gross income.
Dublin has the largest affordability gap. The median price of a first-time buyer home there is now €480,000, meaning a single applicant would need to earn €108,000 to meet the mortgage lending limit.
That income is more than twice Dublin’s median salary of €49,224.
Four other counties also require annual earnings above €90,000. These are Wicklow, Kildare, Meath and Cork.
At the other end of the scale, Longford was identified as the most affordable county in the study. Even there, however, a single first-time buyer would need to earn €48,375 to purchase a typical property.
Ian O’Reilly, director of sales and operations at Chill Insurance, said the figures showed that affordability pressures were no longer concentrated in Dublin.
“A single buyer on the local median income now falls short of what they need in every county, even in the most affordable parts of the country,” he said.
He said buyers were increasingly being forced to consider larger deposits, purchasing with another person or seeking State assistance through schemes such as the First Home Scheme and Local Authority Home Loan.
Economist Austin Hughes said rising house prices were continuing to outpace wage growth, making it harder for first-time buyers to enter the market across Ireland.
He said the figures demonstrated the nationwide scale of the problem and suggested that median wage earners increasingly require financial assistance from the State or family members to buy a typical first home.
Hughes warned that buyers in Dublin and surrounding counties now need incomes close to twice the local median, while the gap is approaching that level in Cork and Galway.
