How much you need to earn to rent a 1-bedroom flat in London
London is one of the least affordable cities in the world, with renters shelling out a significant portion of their salary just to pay for a room or flat within the bounds of the capital.
For this reason, many Londoners faced with sky-high rental prices choose to live with family, friends, or strangers they meet on platforms like Spareroom to share a flat with.
But what if you wanted to live alone in the UK capital? What salary would be enough to afford a home of your own in one of the most expensive cities in the world?
The Economist has addressed this very question in its annual Carrie Bradshaw index, named for the protaganist of American TV show Sex and the City, who lives alone in a flat in New York.
By comparing the median wage in a given city against the average wage of a one-bedroom flat, The Economist calculated the affordability of a range of selected European cities, including London.
The data showed that to afford an average one-bedroom flat (priced at £2,000 per month), Londoners would need to earn £81,000 per year.
This amount is far above the city’s average salary of £55,530, meaning renting alone in London is a privilege available only to a very few.
With a Bradshaw score of 0.68, the UK capital ranked as one of the least affordable on the list, although it scored below several other European cities, including Lisbon, Budapest, Prague, and the least affordable included in the comparison: Tbilisi.
Anything below a Bradshaw Score of 1.0 was deemed to be unaffordable.
Only a few European cities included in the comparison were classified as affordable, including Bonn, Lyon, Bern, Berlin, Helsinki, and Vienna.
Housing affordability is a nationwide problem in the United Kingdom, but it is particularly acute in London, where the average first-time buyer falling around 275,000 short of affording the average home.
More than 1.5 million people have been priced out of buying a home in the UK, and this figure continues to increase as even when people do buy a home, they are doing so at increasingly later stages of life.
