You now have to be rich to buy a house – as the income of a typical home buyer is nearly €30,000 above the national family wage, a new report has found, writes Jamie McCarron.

The median income of home buyers last year was €84,400, while the national median household wage was €58,000, a report from the Central Statistics Office report revealed yesterday.

The CSO found that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown had the highest joint purchaser income for a local authority in 2024 at €157,100, and the lowest was Monaghan, at €77,900.

The Local Electoral Area with the highest median price was Pembroke in Dublin city, with a value of €820,000.

Pembroke also recorded the highest median price among properties bought by joint purchasers, with a value of €940,000.

Nationally, the number of homes purchased stood at 50,030 in 2022, rising to 50,230 in 2023, and falling to 48,780 in 2024.

Between 2023 and 2024, the number of sales in Wicklow rose by 19%, the largest increase by county.

Kildare had the largest drop in sales, seeing a 21% fall.

Sligo was the county with the biggest percentage increase in median purchase price in 2024, going up 26% from the 2023 median price, from €190,000 to €239,000.

Next highest were Limerick and Westmeath, up 17% and 16% respectively.

In terms of citizenship, 76% of the residential property purchasers who were matched to Census 2022 had Irish citizenship, 11% had citizenship elsewhere in the EU, 7% had citizenship in an Asian country and 2% had UK citizenship.

Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin said the report’s findings didn’t surprise him.

“Whole cohorts of working people are being left behind and are not able to afford their own home,” he said.

“There isn’t a big focus on how to meet the housing needs for people above the thresholds for social housing and increasingly unable to access private homes or so-called Affordable Purchase homes.”

David Hall, chief executive of the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation and co-founder of iCare housing body, said the €84,000 median income was “obscene”.

“Very soon it’ll be €100,000 because there is no plan in place. The housing crisis has completely uprooted and upended at least one generation, if not two.
“We were sold a pup in relation to the election around the numbers of houses set to be built.”

Trevor Grant of the Association of Irish Mortgage Advisors added: “For many people today, it is taking much longer to buy a home than they had ever envisaged. Indeed, home ownership has become a pipe dream for a lot of them.”