Yep. The most in the ENTIRE world.
Sorry to bum you out, but it turns out all that complaining about how difficult and expensive it is to live in Ireland these days isn’t just us exaggerating, as a new study has fundamentally proven that we definitely ARE in a bad situation here.
Global rental service Imovirtual released their findings, and it makes for some grim reading.
First of all, Ireland doesn’t have the highest average rent levels in the world, as countries such as Iceland and Luxembourg charge more.
However, when the average rent is weighed against the average wage, then yes, Ireland does indeed come out on top. The “suggested” percentage of wages that should be spent on rent is 30%, but here are the top ten countries in the world in terms of rent-from-wages percentages:
- Ireland – 40.19% (average wages: €3,556, average rent: €1,429)
- Portugal – 38.31%
- Luxembourg – 37.85%
- Israel – 37.76%
- Switzerland – 35.08%
- New Zealand – 33.04%
- Norway – 32%
- Czech Republic – 31.91%
- Iceland – 31.88%
- Japan – 31.16%
In order to find the percentages, based on the list of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Imovirtual used the data to find the average salary for each country, and derived a monthly wage from each, and then used Numbeo’s crowdsourced property data, to find the average monthly rent rate for each country.
For comparison, the percentage of rent spent on wages in the UK is 28%, and in the USA it is 29%.
Meanwhile, the ten lowest percentages are as follows:
- Greece – 19.13% (average wages: €1,978, average rent: €378)
- Slovenia – 19.14%
- Latvia – 20.99%
- Lithuania – 21.82%
- Belgium – 22.11%
- Poland – 23.35%
- Korea – 23.93%
- Germany – 24.16%
- Austria – 24.23%
- Spain – 24.72%
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
