Postbank survey: Almost every second tenant can only just barely afford housing

Almost one in eight tenants (12.2 percent) lives beyond their means, according to their own assessment. "Rent and ancillary costs are overwhelming more and more people in Germany," the analysis states. Compared with a corresponding survey from 2023, when more than 44 percent of tenants still said they could easily bear their housing costs, the situation has noticeably deteriorated.

Homeownership remains a wish – inheritance seen as realistic path

Despite the burden, the desire for homeownership is strong: 47.9 percent of the tenants surveyed would rather live in their own four walls. At the same time, 45.8 percent of the 2,016 respondents overall consider homeownership most achievable through an inheritance. The respondents cite a lack of equity capital as the biggest hurdle to buying a property.

Ulrich Stephan, Chief Investment Strategist for Private and Corporate Clients, to which Postbank belongs, assesses the results as "an indication of how important affordable housing has become for our society and how much the lived reality of tenants and owners has since diverged." Stephan added: "Housing is becoming a financial imposition for more and more tenants."

The Postbank survey is part of a series of studies pointing to a growing housing cost burden in Germany. The burden ratio – that is, the share of households that spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing – is significantly higher in the data than the level international comparative studies still consider bearable. Affordable housing is therefore not just an issue for low-income households, but is increasingly affecting the middle class as well.

Background: What the figures mean

The discrepancy between wish and reality is particularly pronounced among younger adults, who are frequently active on the housing market as tenants and at the same time have only limited equity capital. While the survey does not name age groups, the reference to inheritance as the supposedly most realistic path to homeownership suggests that many respondents consider acquiring property without family support to be barely feasible.

Economic observers have been pointing out for years that rising construction and energy costs, higher interest rates, and a tight supply of building land make the purchase of residential property more difficult. The Postbank study now provides figures that underpin this finding from the perspective of those affected: more than two in five respondents see buying property as realistic only through an inheritance.

Deutsche Bank subsidiary Postbank says it wants to use the survey to draw attention to the growing burden and to spark discussions about affordable housing. Political reactions to the new figures were not immediately available following publication. What is clear, however, is that the data suggest the gap between tenants and owners in Germany continues to widen – and that affordable housing is becoming a problem for ever larger parts of the population.