The Bank of Spain notes that the percentage of Spanish households that own their main residence is increasingly low. The Financial Survey of Families, published this Thursday by the institution, indicates that by the end of 2024, 70.6% of them owned the space they lived in, a drop of one and a half points in just two years. This new decline moves the ratio even further from its peak, close to 90%, reached in 2011. The lower access to ownership is widespread, but more pronounced among those with less accumulated net wealth, something consistent with the boom in prices, which requires more savings to pay the down payment.
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The situation leads to clear conclusions linked to income, wealth, and age: the higher the income and wealth, the more likely one is to be an owner; and the same happens the older one gets: those over 74 years old have an ownership rate (83.4%) that is more than double that of households whose head is under 35 years old (36.7%). The snapshot is even more unequal if it is taken into account that the report only considers emancipated individuals, not young people still living with their parents.
These data, based on interviews with 6,251 households, reveal a trend also reflected in the Living Conditions Survey of the National Statistics Institute, according to which in 2025, 73.3% of households lived in owned homes, the lowest figure in the entire historical series starting in 2004. Last year, housing prices rose by 12.7%, which is increasing the gap between the pace of wage growth and that of housing, making it more difficult for generations wanting to enter the real estate market than previous cohorts. Still, Spain remains above the European average in the percentage of owners, though not by much: according to Eurostat, it has fallen to 13th place among the 27 EU countries.
The survey aims to provide an overview of family finances covering the most important factors: income, wealth, financial and real estate assets, and debts.
Beyond changes in housing habits forced by the economic situation, the Bank of Spain highlights that the median income of Spanish households — the figure that divides the whole into two groups exactly in half, with 50% above and 50% below — grew annually by 3.8% between 2021 and 2023, surpassing for the first time the maximum reached in 2001. After bottoming out in 2013, still with the scars of the financial crisis and the bursting of the real estate bubble very present, incomes have been progressively recovering.
And not only for those who earn the most. Between 2021 and 2023, the greatest growth was observed in lower-income households, with a 7% increase for those in the bottom 20% income bracket, a fact that “represents a decrease in inequality,” the document notes.
As a result, the Gini index, the most common metric for measuring inequality, fell to 0.41, the lowest level in the survey’s historical series. The text does not elaborate on interpretations of why this phenomenon occurred, but everything indicates that factors such as the increase in the minimum wage and the good labor market conditions have been key. The government is paying increasing attention to these indicators: last November it announced it would include poverty and inequality reduction targets for the first time in the macroeconomic framework.
Regarding age, the usual income behavior has an inverted U shape: it increases until retirement and then begins to decrease. The same happens with wealth: younger people have less wealth, which grows as they accumulate income, and decreases somewhat in retirement.
There is the paradox that although the income of the most vulnerable households is the one that increases the most, they are the ones least able to buy housing, with an ownership percentage falling from 55.8% to 53.1% in the bottom 20% income group, contrasting with the increase in the top 10%, which goes from 88.1% to 88.3%. The same happens to the bottom 25% in net wealth (which takes debts into account): their ownership rate falls from 21% to 15.6%.
The increase in income of less affluent households is also not resulting in an increase in their wealth, which may indicate that, unable to enter the ownership cycle, high rental prices are absorbing part of that income improvement: median net wealth between 2022 and 2024 fell in households in the bottom 20%, from 42,100 euros to 40,300 euros.
This statistic, which takes into account all assets and debts, including owned housing, shows that median net wealth grew from 151,700 euros to 160,800 euros, but has not yet reached pre-financial crisis levels. It again shows the generational gap: households with heads aged 65 to 74 have the most wealth, with 249,200 euros, compared to 22,900 euros for those under 35. This gap is because the latter tend to rent more, have spent less time in the labor market earning a salary, have barely benefited from real estate appreciation, and their saving and investment capacity is being reduced by high rental prices.
The Bank of Spain notes greater financial education in households, with increased use of interest-bearing accounts compared to checking accounts that generate no returns. Thirty point one percent of financial assets are held in these, compared to 38.1% two years ago, still a very high amount but tending to decrease in search of other products that limit inflation’s erosion of purchasing power in a period where prices have soared.
The richest are those with the lowest percentage of their net wealth in non-yielding checking accounts. They are also the ones increasingly placing their wealth in shares of unlisted companies: these already represent 25.8% of their financial assets, compared to 18.5% in 2022. The weight of these products (family businesses, startups, or private equity firms) does not reach 2% in the rest, because access is not as easy as acquiring an investment fund at the bank or buying shares online with just a few clicks.
Less debt
One of the most striking trends is the decline in household debt. This is partly due to difficulties in obtaining mortgages because high housing prices prevent it. But it goes further back: deleveraging has been occurring since 2014. The drop in total debt is pronounced in households below the 50th percentile of net wealth, where it went from representing 37.8% of their total assets in 2022 to 31.3% in 2024, while in the upper part there is, on the contrary, a slight increase, indicating that these may be taking advantage of their greater solvency to invest using debt.
The median indebted household dedicated 13.4% of its gross income to debt payments at the end of 2024, an amount not considered excessive, and which continues to decrease — in 2010 it nearly reached 20%. The extremes are marked by lower-income households, with 21.3% of their income dedicated to debt payments, and higher-income households (7.8%).
Indebtedness, in any case, shows signs of being much more orderly than in other times. The percentage of households with high payments, that is, those whose installments represent more than 40% of their income, has fallen to 7.9%, the lowest since 2005, contrasting with what happened in 2008, during the real estate bubble, when they accounted for more than 15%. This suggests that banks, unlike at the beginning of the century, are not granting credit massively to profiles at risk of default.
Purchasing the main residence represented 64.6% of all household debt at the end of 2024, 1.3 points less than at the end of 2022, and the median outstanding amount was 29,900 euros. The price surge and interest rate hikes carried out during this period by the European Central Bank are not causing an increase in delinquency, which remains near 2%, historically low levels.
Households with personal loans, one of the most dangerous financial products due to their high interest rates, fell from 27.4% to 25%, breaking the upward trend observed since 2014, although their median amount has grown from 7,400 to 8,000 euros.