What young tenants in Spain pay, and why their overburden fell

The Consejo de la Juventud de España (CJE) reports that a young wage earner would need 98.7% of their salary to rent a home alone, and 33.6% to rent a room in a shared flat. Eurostat reports that the share of Spanish market-rent tenants overburdened by housing costs fell from 40.9% in 2021 to 26.8% in 2025, while the share of people aged 18–34 living with their parents reached 68.7%, the highest in its series. We measured what young tenants pay from INE's Living Conditions Survey (ECV) microdata, tested whether the falling overburden is a selection effect, and set the CJE's figures beside the measured burden.

What young tenants pay. In 2025, among people aged 18–34 who had left their parents' home and rented at market price (n = 1,048 people in 783 households):

• the median rent paid was 630 € a month, 24.7% of household disposable income;
• the median housing cost burden (rent, utilities and fees, Eurostat's definition) was 30.8%;
• 31.5% were overburdened, spending more than 40% of disposable income on housing (95% interval 26.8–36.1, household bootstrap). For ages 18–29 the figure is 34.0% (n = 438);
• among those who live alone, 63.0% were overburdened (n = 227).

In 2021 the same group's overburden was 42.7% (n = 852). The fall, −11.2 points, is imprecise: its 95% interval runs from −20.9 to −1.5 points.

Our method reproduces Eurostat's figures. Keeping temporarily absent household members, as Eurostat does, our overburden rates by tenure (including the total) match Eurostat's published rates exactly in 76 of 84 tenure-year cells for 2008–2025, and within 0.3 points in all of them: 26.8% for market-rent tenants in 2025, as Eurostat. By age, with age at the end of the income year, 52 of 54 cells match exactly (largest gap 0.1).

Selection on leaving home is real. It cannot explain the national fall; for young tenants it cannot be ruled out.

• Leaving home selects on income. In the ECV panel for 2022–2025, young people in the top quarter of personal income left the parental home at 23.3% a year, against 5.8% for those with no income: four times as often. In the 2013–2016 panel the ratio was under three (17.2% against 6.3%). Leavers include people recorded as moved and not traced.
• Tenants of all ages saw similar falls. From 2021 to 2025, overburden among market-rent tenants fell by 13.3 points at ages 35–49 and by 12.0 points at ages 50–64, against 11.2 points among young tenants. That comparison has little power: the young–35–49 difference is 2.1 points with a 95% interval of −8.8 to 13.0. And it is not a placebo: young tenants' housing costs rose 27.1% and those of tenants aged 35–64 rose 14.7%.
• The same tenant households became less overburdened. In the panel, households that rented at market price in two consecutive years went from 46.5% overburdened in 2022 to 39.1% in 2023, and from 39.1% to 32.7% in 2024 (40.3% to 30.3% with the same members in both years). Their median income rose 10.0% and 9.5%.
• The bound caps one channel only: fewer young people leaving home, which changes who is a tenant. Between 2021 and 2025 the share of 18–34s living with a parent rose from 64.5% to 68.7%, the equivalent of 386,160 people. Suppose they had left home, rented at the current rate and all been overburdened.
• For all tenants, the 2025 rate would be 28.2% instead of 26.8%: this channel can explain at most about a tenth of the 14.1-point fall (10.1%, or 23.1% if every one of them had rented).
• For young tenants the same bound gives 71.3% to 144.1% of their fall (124.0% at ages 18–29). It rules nothing out.
• Within income groups, too. Among young tenants the change in their position in the young income distribution accounts for 2.8 of their 11.2-point fall. That is a floor on selection, not an estimate: the largest falls within groups are where leaving home collapsed.

What else moved. The median disposable income of market-rent households rose 43.5% between the 2021 and 2025 surveys (incomes of 2020 and 2024); their median housing costs, measured at interview, rose 17.5%. Incomes and costs refer to windows of different length. Within the same tenant households, chained median income growth over those years was 35.3%. Had tenants' incomes grown only as fast as their costs, using that within-household growth, 34.8% of tenants would have been overburdened in 2025, not 26.8% (37.7% using the cross-section's income growth, which also reflects who rents). The law limited the annual update of sitting tenants' rents: to the change in the Índice de Garantía de Competitividad until the end of 2023 and to 3% in 2024, unless tenant and landlord agreed otherwise (for large landlords, a cap). INE's rental price index shows rents under existing contracts rising 7.5% from 2021 to 2024, and under new contracts 19.3%.

The CJE's figures and the measured burden answer different questions. The CJE's 98.7% is an asking rent, 1,176 € for 80 m² built, divided by the median net salary of a wage earner aged 16–29, 1,191 € a month. It asks whether a young wage earner could rent a whole flat alone at today's asking price. Its 33.6% asks the same about a room. The ECV asks what those who already rent pay. For tenants aged 16–29 (438 people with a recorded rent and income):

• the median rent paid is 596 €, about half the asking rent;
• that is 24.4% of their household's median income;
• the difference between the two ratios has three parts. Measured against the ECV's own median for young earners (749 € a month), asking rent against rent paid accounts for 36.5%, the tenants' higher own income for 20.8%, and sharing a household for 42.7%. Against the CJE's salary the split is 48.7%, −5.5% and 56.9%: the split depends on the benchmark;
• those who share with flatmates or relatives pay a median 180 € each, 19.3% of their own income.

On the CJE's own question, the microdata agree with it. Only 0.6% of people aged 16–29 (0.8% of young wage earners) have a personal net income at which the asking rent would take 40% or less. The CJE also publishes an ECV-based figure: 780 € of monthly housing costs for young renter households. Our estimate is 770–785 € depending on the age definition and tenure groups; its 30% follows arithmetically from its own income denominator; its 48.9% overburden is not reproduced (35.4% with the same household definition).

The emancipation chart. The CJE's 2006–2025 chart joins two surveys. Its note reads «En 2025, se muestra a la tasa de emancipación calculada con la nueva metodología». The CJE's methodological note says the new figures «no son directamente comparables con las publicadas en ediciones anteriores del Observatorio, que se basaban en la Encuesta de Población Activa». The ECV alone puts 2025 at its lowest since 2004, under either age definition; with age at the end of the income year we get 14.6% against the CJE's 14.5%. We could not build an EPA series that reproduces the CJE's EPA rates, so the EPA cannot tell whether the 2025 fall would show there.

Prior work. The selection argument and the reasons for the fall have been stated before.

• A CJE researcher told Newtral on 30 September 2026 that the ECV measures households already housed.
• elDiario.es (29 September 2026) attributed the falling share of overburdened tenants to income growth at the bottom and to «ahogados invisibles» who stay with their parents.
• DatosRTVE (2 October 2026) compared asking and paid rents, and household and personal incomes, in the same microdata.
• FEDEA (September 2026) computed burden by tenure from the ECV and noted that part of the improvement «coincide con el fuerte crecimiento en número de hogares y personas de este régimen».

What we add:

• the one-channel bound;
• the age comparison, and the panel of continuing tenants;
• the leaving-home gradient by prior income over four panels;
• the decomposition of the 98.7% under two benchmarks;
• a compilation, from INE's releases, of the ECV's fieldwork changes. Interviews moved from autumn (2017–2021) to February–May (2023–2025), shortening the lag between the income year and the rent measured.