Housing prices in Alicante continue to climb, with February marking a new all-time high for the city. At €2,274 per square meter, prices are up 15.3% compared to February 2024 and €400 higher than during the peak of the real estate bubble in 2007.
As property prices soar, so does the financial strain on local families. On average, Alicante residents are now spending nearly 30% of their household income on housing, or almost a third of their total salary. With wage growth lagging behind soaring property prices, the effort required to purchase a home has significantly increased. It now takes an average of eight full years’ worth of a family’s income to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the capital.
This conclusion comes from a study by the real estate portal Idealista, which used data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) for the last quarter of 2023. According to the INE, the cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Alicante stands at €244,584. With the average household income in the city at €30,701, families would need to work for eight years without spending any of their income on anything else to afford the property.
Alicante now ranks as the sixth most expensive capital in Spain in terms of the number of years of income required to buy a home. It trails only Barcelona, San Sebastián, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca, and Málaga, and is ahead of Valencia, Tenerife, and Bilbao. This makes the city even less affordable than the Spanish average, where it typically takes six years of a family’s income to buy a two-bedroom apartment, which costs €187,108 on average, according to INE.
In the wider Alicante province, the situation is similar. The average housing price has slightly decreased to €217,048, but with household incomes falling by about €3,000 to €27,380, families now need to allocate 7.9 years of their total income to purchase an average home. Certain areas like Benidorm, Moraira, and Benitatxell have seen prices surge to historic highs, adding further financial strain.
