From 9 Months to 216 Years: How Long It Takes to Save for a Home Deposit Around the World

Paul Hoffman
August 12, 2026August 12, 2026

At the bottom of the ranking, the disparity becomes extraordinary. Burundi ranks as the country where the longest time is theoretically needed to save for a home deposit. The standard 20% down payment on a home costing €224,441 ($259,483) is €44,888 – although this price is likely what you would find if seeking more luxurious properties since it is an average of just a few dozen prices submitted on Numbeo.

Still, it is equivalent to 2,595 months of gross average income, which at the end of 2025 stood at only $20 or a little over €17. This should be taken with a grain of salt, too, since many workers in the country are likely receiving additional income from informal labour in the grey economy. Even if we downsize it a bit, the result is still dumbfounding – these 2,595 months mean more than 216 years of gross income. Mozambique’s situation is just as extraordinary at 1,420 months needed to cover a fifth of a home price (more than 118 years), while Zambia requires 1,260 months – approximately 105 years, meaning even a lifetime of average earnings would not be enough to afford a home.

The next most difficult markets to save for a 20% home deposit include the Democratic Republic of the Congo (846 months), Rwanda (726 months), and Djibouti (617 months). Angola, Senegal, Nigeria and Gambia complete the ten countries with the longest theoretical saving periods, all requiring at least 363 months or over 30 years of gross income.

The results are astonishing, but there is a pattern to the absurdity. One important factor is the prevalence of informal employment across many of the countries at the bottom of the ranking, meaning that formal salary data may not capture the full range of income earned by workers. At the same time, the property prices are based on user-submitted data from an online platform and may not fully reflect housing markets across entire countries, particularly in areas with lower Internet access or fewer reported transactions. These limitations are relevant across the dataset, but may be particularly important when interpreting the most extreme results.

Europe in Focus: Greeks with the Highest Housing Burden on the Continent

Saving for a deposit is only the first hurdle to home ownership, and getting the keys does not suddenly make housing cheap, either. For many households, the bigger question comes afterwards: how much of each month’s pay cheque disappears just to keep a roof over their heads? Looking at the share of income people spend on housing gives us another way of seeing the pressure households face – and the picture of housing cost burdens across Europe is far from even.

Greece has the highest share of urban residents paying more than 40% of household income on housing. Аlthough homes there are not as expensive as in Northern Europe, roughly 26.9% of residents set aside this much amount on housing. The next-largest housing burdens are in Denmark, where 25.3% of people spend over 40% of their income on housing, Switzerland with a 18.2% share, and Norway and the UK with 17.5% and 16.2%, respectively.

But not everywhere are residents as overburdened – despite relatively high housing prices, the high incomes in some countries make these costs more manageable. In the Netherlands, the share of city residents paying 40% or more of their household income on housing stands at just 8.8%. In France, it is 9%, and in Luxembourg, it is 11.6%.

Meanwhile, Croatia and Cyprus record the lowest housing burden rates in the ranking – only 2.6% of urban residents set aside over 40% of their income on housing. Other affordable places are Albania (3.4%) and North Macedonia (4.2%). The lower wages here are combined with lower prices, but there is another peculiarity that factors in – most of these countries also have high homeownership rates. This means that fewer residents are at the mercy of fluctuating property markets, mortgage interest rates, and rents.

How Long Would It Take to Save & Buy a Home Outright?

The idea of buying a home outright can feel almost like a relic from another era: put some money aside, buy the property, and owe nothing to a bank. But the gap between wages and house prices makes that prospect vastly different from one country to the next. In the most affordable markets by this measure, the full price of an average home is equivalent to less than five years of gross income.

In the United States, for example, it takes 4 years of gross annual income to match the price of an average-sized home (3 years and 8 months, to be exact). At the other extreme, the figure reaches an extraordinary 1,081 years in Burundi, showing just how dramatically local earning power changes what home ownership actually costs.

Across the ranking, the divide is enormous. Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Italy are among the European countries where the average home costs less than eight years of gross income, while Romania requires exactly 12 years and Bulgaria 12 years and two months. Moldova, however, Romania’s little neighbour to the west, offers the worst affordability levels in Europe – there, residents earning the average gross income ($8,050/year) need to set aside their entire earnings for 30 years to be able to buy a home outright.

Further down the list, the figures move from decades into generations: buying an average home outright requires more than 50 years of gross income in several countries and more than 100 years in a growing number of markets. Of course, nobody can realistically put their entire gross salary towards a house, but the comparison paints a gloomy illustration of how far property ownership can sit beyond the reach of ordinary earnings.

Methodology

To compare housing affordability across countries, the team at BestBrokers analysed average home prices alongside local income levels. Average property prices for an average-sized home of 108 square metres (1,170 square feet) were sourced from Numbeo, using the latest available country-level data. To identify what is considered an average home size, we calculated the average size of typical residential properties across various countries as reported by The Globe and Mail.

Average gross monthly and annual incomes were sourced from WorldData, allowing us to compare property values with typical pre-tax earnings in each market. We also sourced housing burden estimates for European urban residents from Eurostat. All prices and income figures were converted from U.S. dollars to Euros using the August 7 2026 exchange rate from the Xe.com currency converter.

For the home deposit estimates, we assumed a 20% deposit, a commonly used benchmark for a home purchase. The deposit was calculated by multiplying the average home price by 20%, then dividing that amount by the average gross monthly income to determine the number of months of income required to cover it.

For the outright purchase analysis, the full average home price was divided by the average gross annual income to calculate the number of years of gross income required to cover the property’s purchase price.

These calculations are intended as a theoretical affordability comparison, rather than a realistic estimate of how long an individual would need to save. They assume that 100% of gross income could be put towards the purchase and do not account for tax, everyday living expenses, existing financial commitments, mortgage costs, interest, property taxes or transaction fees.