Rents are rising more than twice as fast as wages, and buying a home would now require around twenty years of net income, without spending a single euro on anything else. These are some of the figures presented on Thursday, November 12, at the Joe Cassar hall in Borgo Maggiore, during an evening dedicated to the housing emergency organized by RETE, which is working on a bill covering rents, unused properties, mortgages and social housing.
Between 2015 and 2025, the average rental fee rose by 36.4%, compared with just 15.9% for average territorial wages. Over the same period, consumer prices climbed by 21.1%. Once inflation is factored in, wages actually lost 4.3% of their real value, while rents grew by 12.7% in real terms. Had salaries kept pace with rents, the monthly average would now stand at €2,648 instead of €2,249 — a gap of €399.
For those looking for housing today, the bill can be even steeper. Ten rental listings surveyed across three Castelli show an average monthly rent of €1,055 for an average surface area of 86.2 square meters. The sample is small and not representative of the whole market, but it offers a sense of the figures being asked of prospective tenants.
A rent of that size would absorb 59% of a net salary of €1,800. For wages based on the first-category brackets in commerce and industry — €1,425 and €1,475 respectively — the share would rise to 74% and 72%. Even with two incomes totaling €2,900, rent would still eat up 36% of earnings.
There is also the issue of contract length. Of the 477 rental agreements registered in San Marino in 2025, 97.3% run for no more than three years, and 45.7% last a maximum of twelve months. In Rimini, by contrast, of the 3,081 new contracts signed in the same year, the ratio is reversed: 70.8% run for more than three years.
Buying a home requires equally daunting sums. An analysis of 164 residential listings up to 200 square meters — counting duplicate listings only once — shows an average asking price of €452,747, or €4,093 per square meter. These are listing prices, meaning sellers’ asking figures, not amounts actually paid at closing.
Only 17 of the 164 homes surveyed cost less than €200,000 — roughly one in ten. By contrast, 126 listings, nearly 77%, start at €300,000 or more. New builds reach a weighted average of €4,732 per square meter, compared with €3,683 for existing properties — about 28% more.
Dividing the average asking price by the average gross annual private-sector wage of €29,558 works out to 15.3 years of salary. Factoring in an average net annual income of €22,000–23,000, the figure rises to roughly twenty years — a calculation that excludes mortgage interest, purchase costs and everyday living expenses.
Meanwhile, the number of households is growing even as their average size shrinks: as of June 2026, there were 15,192 households, up 7.4% from an initial count of 14,140. Single-person households account for 88% of that increase, while the average number of people per household has fallen from 2.34 to 2.24.
