Where the numbers come from.

Two kinds of number are on this site, and they are not equally good. The annual series behind the chart come from published statistics and are listed below with their licences. The headline figures in the calculator run to 2026 and are still mostly estimates. This page keeps the two apart.

The mortgage line is still the most uncertain thing here. Euro-area rates now come from the ECB, but they are a euro-area average: every euro country on this site shares one rate series, so differences between, say, Germany and Portugal are absent rather than measured. Outside the euro area the rates are hand-made estimates. National central banks are the sources to replace both with.

The site is also not adjusted for tax, and every pay figure is gross.

Headline figures

The calculator's inputs · 2016 → 2026

These are single cumulative changes, not series, and each runs to its own end year — shown after the arrow. A figure with an annual series behind it is measured; the rest were compiled by chaining published annual rates and are marked est. Estimated figures generally run a few points above the measured ones, because they include 2025 and 2026, which the published series do not yet cover.

CountryPricesPayHomesMortgage rateRate source

Anchors used when compiling these: US CPI-U +39% (BLS); UK CPI +41.5%; EU HICP +33.0% 2016→2025 (Eurostat), highest Hungary +73.2%, lowest Cyprus +19.5%; Case-Shiller national ≈ +80%; OECD real average annual wages 2016→2024.

Refreshing all of it

Two scripts, no dependencies, no API keys

Annual series
node scripts/build-data.mjs — rebuilds data/series.js from the mirrors listed above.
Headline figures
node scripts/fetch-eurostat.mjs — rewrites data/headline.js from Eurostat, and adds Eurostat annual series for European countries. Needs access to ec.europa.eu.
Hand-downloaded files
Wages, house prices and mortgage rates come from files committed in sources/. Every download link, and the exact options to pick, are recorded in sources/DOWNLOADS.md — including the traps that produce a file that looks right and is not.
Neither script touches
Country names, currencies and locales. Those are maintained by hand.