Enter a country, a year, and what you earned. See what that salary needs to be today to buy the same things, match average pay, buy the same house, or carry its mortgage. The four answers are nowhere near each other.
About the numbers
Consumer prices are national CPI as collected by the World Bank, not the harmonised HICP — the two differ by a point or more over a decade. Pay is the OECD's average annual wage per full-time equivalent employee, in nominal national currency, so it is an average and not a typical worker's pay. Housing is the residential property price index for existing and new dwellings — purchase prices, not rents.
The mortgage line prices the same house at today's rates: it multiplies the change in house prices by the change in the monthly annuity payment, assuming an unchanged loan-to-value ratio and a 25-year repayment mortgage at the country's typical rate for new housing loans. Deposit and fees scale with the price; tax relief, term changes and fixation periods are not modelled.
Still missing: any pay or house price figure for Cyprus, which appears in neither OECD dataset, and mortgage rates outside the euro area, which remain estimates.
Why these numbers and not others
National CPI rather than HICP. Eurostat's harmonised index is the better basis for comparing European countries with each other, and it is what this site should use. It is not what it uses. The World Bank's national CPI was reachable, covers all 23 countries including the US in one consistent series, and goes back to 1960, where HICP starts in 1996 and excludes the US entirely. The cost of that choice is real: national CPI and HICP differ by more than a point over a decade for some countries, they treat owner-occupied housing differently, and the World Bank mirror carries a wrong value for Romania in 2024, which is flagged on the data page rather than quietly corrected.
Nominal everywhere, never real. Every series here is in cash of the day. Real series — inflation-adjusted pay, real house prices — are published for all of these and would be wrong to use, because this site's whole job is to divide one series by another. A real wage already has consumer prices divided out of it; comparing it against consumer prices would count inflation twice and understate the gap. The same goes for the price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios OECD publishes alongside its house price index.
Average annual wages rather than a labour cost index. Eurostat's labour cost index is current and harmonised, but it measures what an hour of labour costs an employer, including social contributions and other non-wage costs. OECD's average annual wages is closer to what appears on a payslip. It is still an average per full-time equivalent employee, so it says nothing about how pay is spread: minimum wages rose faster than average wages across most of Europe over this period, so the lowest paid did better than these figures suggest.
National house price indices for the US and UK. OECD publishes house prices for both, and this site ignores those in favour of Case-Shiller and Nationwide, on the grounds that a country's own index beats a cross-country compilation of it. That choice moves the answer: for 2016 to 2025 OECD's US series says +90.6% where Case-Shiller says +83.5%. Seven points, from nothing but the choice of index.
Gross pay. Tax and social contributions are not modelled anywhere. Tax wedges changed over these decades and modelling 23 tax systems across sixty years is a different project. Every salary figure on this site is therefore before deductions, including the mortgage-qualifying figure, which is how lenders quote it anyway.
One mortgage rate for the whole euro area. The ECB series used here is the euro-area aggregate, so thirteen countries share one rate and the real differences between them are missing rather than measured. Per-country rates exist in the same ECB dataset and would be a straightforward improvement. Outside the euro area the rates are estimates, and the mortgage figures are marked accordingly.
Every series behind the chart is listed with its publisher, licence and method on the sources page , and the year-by-year numbers are on the data page .
Figures marked ≈ in the table have no annual series behind them and are estimates compiled from published annual rates. Euro-area mortgage rates come from the ECB but are a euro-area average , not a national rate; outside the euro area they are still estimates, which is why the mortgage line keeps its ≈ .