It’s not a newsflash to be reminded that the cost of living in Sydney is high. But it’s a kick in the guts to learn that Sydney isn’t just expensive by Australian standards, but by global standards, too. A new report has just confirmed that Sydney’s housing market is the second-most expensive in the world, for the second year running.
For more than two decades, the Demographia International Housing Affordability report has ranked housing affordability across 95 major metropolitan areas in eight countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. To determine the rankings, the researchers at Chapman University compare median house prices to median household incomes, scoring each market on a scale from ‘affordable’ (3.0 or less) to ‘impossibly unaffordable’ (9.0 or more).
For the first time ever, not a single one of the 95 housing markets assessed was classified as ‘affordable’. This news is even more grim for potential Aussie homebuyers, with five Australian cities ranked among the 15 least affordable places to buy a home worldwide in 2025.
Sydney was the second-worst place for housing affordability in the world, trailing only behind Hong Kong. This isn’t anything new – the NSW capital has ranked as the first, second or third-most unaffordable housing market in 16 of the last 17 years. In 2025, it had an ‘impossibly unaffordable’ score of 13.8, with the report finding that median house prices across the city are between nine and 15 times the median household income. Gulp!
Three other Australian cities joined Sydney in the ‘impossibly unaffordable’ club, with Adelaide ranking sixth, Melbourne ninth and Brisbane 11th. Adelaide’s affordability score of 10.9 even placed it ahead of San Francisco and Honolulu, while Brisbane’s 9.3 rating pushed it into the same bracket as Australia’s largest cities. The report described it as “remarkable” that these Aussie cities are now “less affordable than widely recognised world cities like New York, London or Chicago.”
Perth’s score of 8.3 was just shy of the ‘impossibly unaffordable’ category, placing it as the 14th most unaffordable housing market in the world.
According to the report, the housing affordability crisis is largely driven by “urban containment” measures such as growth boundaries and restrictive land-use policies. It also identified land value as the biggest cost factor in these markets, with prices soaring in areas where development was allowed near previously restricted zones. For more, you can explore the full report here.
The 15 most unaffordable housing markets in the world
- Hong Kong
- Sydney
- San Jose
- Vancouver
- Los Angeles
- Adelaide
- Honolulu
- San Francisco
- Melbourne
- San Diego
- Brisbane
- London
- Toronto
- Perth
- Miami
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