Barcelona is the most expensive city in Spain to rent a room in
Average cost is €442.40 per month, ahead of San Sebastian and Madrid
Barcelona is the most expensive city in Spain to rent a room in according to a report by the pisos.com rental platform.
At an average of €442.2 per month, the Catalan capital is pricier than San Sebastián-Donostia in the Basque Country (€425.02/month) and Madrid (€414.36/month).
Meanwhile, Ciudad Real (€160.36/month) is the cheapest city in Spain behind Lugo (€171.67/month), Badajoz (€180.10/month), Palencia (€182.27/month), and Jaén (€197.51/month).
Renting a room in Barcelona costs almost €175 more per month than the Spain-wide average of €267.79 per month, and with Madrid, the cities are home to 35.25% of all rooms for rent and 35.33% of room seekers.
In Spain as a whole, most tenants are women (54.89%). Per age groups, over half of all tenants are 18 to 25 years old (51.10%), while 29.29% are 26 to 35 years old, 10.95% are 36 to 45, and 6.58% are 46 to 60. Only 2.08% of all renters are over 60.
Catalonia's rent cap law
As part of an ongoing battle to reign in onerous rent prices in cities like Barcelona, housing rights activists such as the PAH anti-eviction group or the Sindicat de Llogateres tenants' union successfully lobbied for a Catalan rent cap law, which came into effect in late September 2020.
The law, which affects 61 municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants and "tense housing markets," including the major cities of Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona, states that rent prices must be set by the Catalan Housing Agency's Average Price Index.
Yet, it was already clear from the outset that the regulation was in for a bumpy ride, with the conservative People's Party pledging to challenge it in Spain's Constitutional Court right after it was approved in Parliament by pro-independence and En Comú Podem MPs. The conservatives ended up lodging a complaint only three months later.
More recently, this past July the Spanish government also challenged the law's legality in court, but did not ask for it to be suspended immediately pending a Constitutional Court ruling.
Although rent prices in Barcelona have dropped slightly due to the pandemic and the rent cap law, the Catalan capital remains Spain's evictions capital with 18 per day, despite a moratorium on evictions for vulnerable people.
In Catalonia as a whole, where 56% of salaries go towards rent, prices have risen 30 times more than wages from 2015 to 2019. And last year in Barcelona, the average rent — €964.81 — was higher than the minimum wage.
Filling the Sink podcast
Press play below to listen to the Filling the Sink podcast episode (June 26, 2021) on how rent prices and evictions in Catalonia have pushed housing to the top of the social and political agenda.
