For every young adult right now the feeling must be the same: housing is hard. The prices for buying are insane with little being available under €400'000 and if you stick with renting you'll lucky to pay less than €2'000 per month. And we haven't even started about the ridiculous requirements that landlords and banks put on our incomes for us to be eligible.

The other day at the office we were going through the motions of complaining about this in a group of thirty-something-year-olds, when an older colleague butted in with "hey, but in our days it was just as hard to have a place to live". We were eager to claim that they did not understand what the situation feels like today and then the other colleague added that they were more unfortunate with high mortgage interests. This made me pause and now I wander if we really are worse off than our parents, or if we are just doing the typical generational complaining. So I am looking for a comparison of salaries and cost of living over the years.

Note that this is written from the perspective as living in the Netherlands. All numbers will be based on that too. Although I imagine it should at least reflect the state in similar countries.

House Prices

In 2025 buying a house costs €487'400 on average. This average would include the most expensive villas and the smallest studios, so it could be skewed. It would be ideal to track exactly one type of house in a particular city, but such data I cannot find. To add a single data-point to this: I am personally close to buying a house in the province of Utrecht and I'll spend very close to this amount for a 35 years old, well-kept townhouse with 3 bedrooms, 90m2 and a little garden. Based on my own observations this average represents a 'normal' house for a starting family.

CBS has a neat overview of average selling prices for existing houses since 1995, see the graph below. I included the number for 2025 myself. Note that this is the average of actual sales, not bases on estimation, taxation or indexes.
There is another nice table showing the prices of houses in a couple of different cities. Although they all remain different, their respective ratios change in very similar ways.

I'll say that price averages going from roughly €100'000 to €500'000 from 1995 to 2025 is not a great start.

Income

But maybe we all started earning a massive amount more, so let's dive into salaries over the years. Now, statistics on income are always tricky because different metrics can paint very different pictures. The mean (the 'average') can be heavily skewed by a select few that make massive amounts more than the majority. Things like the percentage of people that work and how much they work per week ought to also be accounted for. The only number that's clearly published over history in the modal income, so we just take that. Somewhat surprisingly CBS does not have a clear graph about historical modal incomes. There is however a clear table on the Wikipedia page (which I cannot find directly in Wikipedia's sources), but we will continue with those numbers.
The modal income over 2025 is €46'000 (including the standard 8% holiday allowance). In 1995 this was €22'000. This doubling of salaries does not exactly compensate the quintupling of house prices. The graph below shows the modal income and the house prices over the years.

Combined

Let's make some more interesting graphs.The first series shows the division of the average house selling price by the modal salary, resulting the expected number of years needed to pay off a house (of course nobody could realistically put 100% of their gross salary into a house). In 1995 it was easy at just over 4 years for a house, between 2000 and 2015 this hovered around 7 years but from 2020 this is a solid 10 years. This already demonstrates the difference between the past and now, especially in just the 5 recent years.

But this is just the selling price. Everybody will always have needed to loan the money with a mortgage and on loans we must pay interest. So let's try and make a full picture: for every year we calculate what the monthly mortgage payment would be (pay-off plus interest), based on a 30-year annuity mortgage, loaning the full amount for a house and with the interest at the time. This amount divided by the monthly salary results in the portion of a modal salary that would go to buying a house. I think this is the most complete number we can consider as it displays the load that somebody actually experiences to keep their house.
The second graph shows this mortgage interest itself. I will say that this is the one thing people in 1995 did not have going for them. And after 2022 we got doubly unlucky: expensive houses and an increased mortgage interest. As a bonus I also added the 'consumer price index', which is a measure calculated by the CBS for how expensive it is to live (not adjusted for inflation). It includes things like groceries, gas and cost of unities, but not rent or a mortgage. Notice how it follows the modal salary pretty closely.

Shortcomings

I have not considered taxes or tax discounts, mostly because I couldn't easily find clear info on this. However, I don't think income taxes have changed so significantly over the last 30 years.
Also the mortgage interest discount I did not consider: the interest we pay on our mortgages is (to an extend) income tax deductible, resulting in lower income taxes and effectively giving a discount on your mortgage payments. But I could not reliably calculate all of this since 1995. And I do not think this has changed so much either.

Conclusions

I will admit I was a little surprised by the graph of the relative load of mortgage payments. I was expecting a steady line going up, but it is fairly flat and it actually dips lower again from 2015 to 2021. Mostly it shows that from 2022 and on the situation got a lot worse, with relative loads going from 40% to 60%.
So the difference between our parents in 2000 and us now is an increase of 50% to 59%, which is not staggering.

So are we just being dramatic? Are we paying as much as older people used to? Maybe, but there is one more factor: how much a bank is willing to lend you. Now a bank will lend you roughly 4.5 times your gross yearly salary. That means for that for that average house of €487'000 you will need a combined income of €108'000. Which equals 2.35 modal incomes. Basically, the average couple does not come close to being allowed to buy the average house. And that is something young adults really feel nowadays.