In One Year, House Prices Rose 18.3% in Hungary and Fell in Finland

One year, twenty points of difference

House price inflation is not a European phenomenon with national variations. In 2025 it was a set of national phenomena that happen to share a currency in most cases.

Across the EU, house prices rose 5.5% on annual average. Behind that figure Hungary recorded 18.3% and Finland −2.3%, a spread of 20.6 percentage points inside a single year.

Where housing got much more expensive

Hungary leads at 18.3%, followed by Portugal at 17.6%, Bulgaria at 14.6%, Croatia at 13.9% and Spain at 12.7%. Slovakia at 12.4% and Czechia at 10.4% complete the group above 10%.

Seven Member States recorded double-digit house price growth in one year. For a household not already on the housing ladder, a 15% annual increase moves the purchase price faster than almost any plausible increase in savings.

Portugal and Spain in that group are the ones with the widest external attention, and both combine strong price growth with substantial international demand for housing. This dataset records the prices and contains nothing about who is buying, so this study does not attribute the increases.

Where prices stalled or fell

Finland recorded −2.3%, the only Member State where house prices fell over the year, and the third year running that they have. The annual series has Finland at −6.2% in 2023 and −3.1% in 2024 before this year's −2.3%: a fall that is narrowing each year without stopping.

That run is what distinguishes it. Germany, Luxembourg, Sweden and France all recorded a fall in 2023 or 2024 and have since returned to growth, so Finland is not alone in having had a bad year — it is alone in still having one.

France recorded 0.7%, Sweden 1.0% and Luxembourg 1.6%.

Falling prices are not straightforwardly good news or bad. For a prospective buyer they improve affordability; for an existing owner they erode equity, and for a banking system with mortgage exposure they are a supervisory matter. This indicator measures the direction and says nothing about which of those effects dominates.

Why the aggregate is close to useless here

The EU figure of 5.5% describes very few Member States. Thirteen are above 7% and eight at 4% or below; the countries near the aggregate are a minority of a distribution with substantial mass at both ends.

Aggregates work when a distribution is concentrated. On this indicator, in this year, it is not, and a European average of 5.5% would misdescribe both the Hungarian and the Finnish experience by a wide margin.