How much you need to earn to rent a room in London in 2025

If you’re a renter, you’ve probably heard of the ‘30 percent rule’. And if you’re lucky enough to be blissfully unaware of this, it’s a budgeting theory that says your rent should never be more than 30 percent of your income. 

In London, where a bog-standard room in a flatshare can easily cost upwards of £1,000, there’s fat chance of the 30 percent rule coming true for most residents. 

Now, new research from SpareRoom has revealed exactly how much you would need to earn to comfortably rent a room in the capital. In London the average price of a room is currently £995 per month. According to SpareRoom, Londoners would need to earn a salary of £40,000 or more for their rent to be 30 percent of their gross salary. 

However, if you wanted your rent to be 30 percent of your net salary (that’s take-home pay), it would need to be much more than this. Let’s break down the numbers: to pay £995 per month and meet the 30 percent rule, Londoners would need a monthly take-home packet of £3,317, equating to £39,804 per year – that’s after paying tax. To make this number, Londoners would actually need to be earning well over £50,000 a year. 

This is well above the median monthly pay for London, which according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) was £2,992 in September 2025, equalling a gross income of £35,900. This means that the majority of London residents will be falling many thousands of pounds behind annually. Ouch. 

The salary you need to buy a house in every London borough. 

From speed-flatmating to ‘au pairing for the elderly’, meet the Londoners taking renting to extremes.