Housing affordability in England and Wales: 2019

Office for National Statistics (ONS) have produced data analysis on house prices and annual earnings to calculate affordability ratios for national and subnational geographies in England and Wales, on an annual basis.

Main points:

• In England in 2019, full-time employees could typically expect to spend around 7.8 times their workplace-based annual earnings on purchasing a home; this is a significant improvement from the previous year, when the ratio was 8.0.

• In Wales in 2019, full-time employees could typically expect to spend around 5.8 times their workplace-based annual earnings on purchasing a home, which is not significantly different to 2018.

• At a local level, earnings grew faster than house prices in 55% of local authority districts, leading to improvements in housing affordability in these areas; however, these were not statistically significant changes.

• In 2019, new dwellings remained less affordable than existing dwellings in both England and Wales.

• The gap between the most and least affordable local authorities decreased in 2019, the first decrease since 2015.

• ONS have also published alternative measures of housing affordability, which provide a more detailed picture of affordability for people in different circumstances, with data going up to 2018.