Housing, second salary is the new barrier to entry: in Florence for single-income earners the offer is only 1%

A challenge between prices and incomes. The property market in Italy's large cities is going through a tense phase: rising house prices and rising interest rates - albeit lower than in the recent past - continue to squeeze households' purchasing power. The ability to access a house, whether owned or rented, has become a variable closely dependent on the composition of family income and local geography, with an increasingly clear gap between the metropolises of the North and the centres of the South.

In this context, the availability of a second income from employment becomes the discriminating element between the possibility of living in a metropolitan centre and exclusion from this market. In the area of buying and selling, the gap between different urban realities is stark. According to the latest Market Monitor 2025 by Immobiliare.it Insight, the cities that guarantee greater serenity for buyers are Reggio Calabria, Messina and Genoa, where a two-income family can access 87.7%, 85.2% and 77.7% of the real estate offer respectively. On the contrary, Florence is confirmed as the most prohibitive city, with just 16.4% of the market accessible to couples, followed by Milan and Venice, which present clear criticalities, with quotas for two-income earners not exceeding 39.1% and 37.4%.

The panorama splits brutally as soon as one shifts the focus to families who have to rely on a single salary: the barrier to entry in the large metropolises becomes almost insurmountable. The worst is still Florence, where the possibility for a single-income earner to conclude a purchase is reduced to a trickle, with barely 1% of the market offer really accessible. Things are not much better in the nerve centres of northern economic dynamism: in Bologna and Milan, purchase opportunities stop at a market share of 4% and 6.5% respectively. The "happy islands" for single-income buyers are concentrated in Southern Italy and along the Ligurian arc: in Reggio Calabria more than six out of ten homes (61.2%) are accessible, followed by Messina with 57.4% and Genoa, where the available market share stands at a solid 51.7%.

The rental sector reflects similar dynamics, although showing some localised exceptions. Reggio Calabria once again stands out as the most favourable location, with affordability for households with two incomes close to the entire market (93.8%). This is followed by Messina at 84.2 per cent and Turin at 76.7 per cent. Despite the general fall in accessibility to rent due to the increase in rents, cities such as Bologna, Milan and Naples showed signs of a counter-trend with a slight improvement in two-income accessibility compared to the previous year, by 4.1%, 2.2% and 1% respectively. Looking at the long-term evolution with respect to 2021, it is Florence that is showing the deepest signs of the crisis in the real estate market, having lost a good 39 percentage points of accessibility in the rental segment (thanks to the rush of short rentals) and 25.8 points in the sales segment. These figures confirm how price dynamics and credit conditions are making the metropolitan markets increasingly selective, with only a few centres managing to maintain favourable conditions for the middle class.

How much does a two-room apartment in the semi-centre 'weigh' on an average net salary? In 2025, rent is no longer just an expense item, but a true indicator of urban economic capacity. The ratio of rents to disposable income clearly shows how selective the rental market has become in major Italian cities. The latest analysis by the Locare Studies Office compares Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples and Palermo and measures the real incidence of rents on average net incomes, highlighting a three-speed Italia on the housing affordability front