European housing affordability, explained by where the jobs are and where they aren't at NUTS-3 level.
Housing is the single largest expense for most European households. This is not a controversial claim - everyone who pays rent or a mortgage knows it. Food, transport, healthcare: none comes close. The question is not whether housing dominates household budgets, but whether we can measure how much and where.
Eurostat publishes exactly such a measure. The EU-SILC survey asks households across Europe what they spend on housing - rent or mortgage interest, utilities, insurance, maintenance, taxes - and reports the total as a share of disposable income. Here is what it says for the five countries featured in this analysis.
