Home Price to Income Ratio: Where Americans Get the Most for Their Money

Price-to-income ratio is the single best measure of housing affordability. It asks: how many years of the typical household's gross income does it take to buy the typical home? The US number right now is about 5.2x — $420K median home, $81K median household income. Historically, a healthy ratio is 3x to 4x. Anything above 5x starts to look like a structural affordability crisis.

Our table ranks the 20 countries in our dataset by this ratio. The most affordable is Japan at 4.9x income: our median listing price for that country divided by its local median household income. That is a number a working family can actually save towards in a human lifetime.

South Korea (6.0x income) and Ireland (7.4x income) come next. These three share a common thread — they are countries where local wages are below US levels but housing supply is either loose or culturally undervalued. Americans arriving with US-denominated savings get a double arbitrage: they pay the local price in a currency that earns the global wage.

The bottom of the table is where it gets grim. Philippines comes in at 53.9x income, the worst ratio in the dataset. That is genuinely worse than the US — higher prices relative to local incomes. Thailand at 35.6x income is the other country where locals are structurally priced out. These are markets where an American with savings can still buy, but locals without family help increasingly cannot. It's worth knowing the politics of that before you show up and outbid a twenty-something nurse.

A methodology warning. Income data is notoriously hard to compare across countries because each statistics office defines "household income" differently — gross vs net, pre-tax vs post-tax, individual vs household, nominal vs PPP-adjusted. We used each country's national statistics office median where possible, falling back to World Bank GNI per capita adjusted for household size where not. Every row in the raw dataset at /api/insights/home-price-to-income-ratio includes a 'incomeSource' URL so you can verify the underlying figure.

The US ratio of 5.2x should be a scandal. Thirty years ago it was closer to 3x. The table above shows that it doesn't have to be this way: in 1 out of 20 countries in our dataset, the ratio is actually lower than the US. For Americans earning US wages and spending in those local markets, the effective ratio is lower still — often by a factor of two. That's the actual arbitrage of leaving: not cheaper houses, but the ratio of house to salary returning to something normal.