€350 out of €1,300: what young people in Spain really pay for housing, and how to get there

Miriam González put one number at the centre of Democracia 21's housing pitch when she launched the party in Madrid on 10 October. El Español reported her words: if young people are earning €1,300, the most they should spend on renting or buying a home is €350, and until that happens every housing tax should go for under-35s. We looked at the tax half of that in our piece on the under-35 tax cut, and the speech as a whole in our overview of the party's proposals. Here we test the target itself against the data.

The target is the standard one

€350 out of €1,300 is about 27% of income. That puts González's ceiling almost exactly on the line that Spain's youth council uses. The Consejo de la Juventud de España (CJE) publishes an Observatorio de Emancipación, and its 2025 report, out in May 2026, applies the usual 30% affordability threshold to the young median net salary of €1,191.02 a month. The result is a "tolerable rent" of €357.31 a month for a young salaried person, €259.75 for those aged 16–24 and €404.93 for those aged 25–29. So the party picked a target that housing economists and the youth council would both recognise. One detail matters: the typical young worker earns less than the €1,300 in the example, and the number they can afford is lower.

How far away it is

Very far. The CJE puts the average asking rent for a flat at €1,176 a month at the end of 2025, a record. Renting it alone would take 98.7% of a young person's net salary: 135.8% for those under 25 and 87.1% for those aged 25–29. A room, at a median of about €400, takes 33.6%, which already breaks the threshold, and the CJE points out that the 30% line is meant for a home, not a room in someone else's. Idealista's data for the second quarter of 2026 puts the average room at €425 a month, €550 in Madrid and €600 in Barcelona.

The consequence is in the emancipation figures. Only 14.5% of 16–29-year-olds lived away from their parents in 2025, the lowest rate the CJE has recorded, and only 25.2% of those with a job had left home. Eurostat puts the average age of leaving the parental home in Spain at 30.2 in 2025, tied with Italy, against 26.3 across the EU. The young people who do rent pay heavily for it: young renting households spend €780 a month on average, about 30% of their income, and 48.9% of them spend more than 40%. Across all ages, 26.8% of Spanish tenants paying market rent spend 40% or more of their income on housing, according to Eurostat, against 18.6% in the EU as a whole.

What the state already pays

Spain's main tool is direct help. The old Bono Alquiler Joven paid €250 a month for two years. The State Housing Plan 2026–2030, approved by Royal Decree 326/2026 in April, replaces it with an aid of up to €300 a month towards a flat and €200 towards a room, never more than 60% of the rent, for people up to 35 with incomes up to five times the IPREM. Rents must be at most €1,000 for a flat and €600 for a room, with lower caps in small towns. The aid lasts two years and can be extended by two more, and the regions run the calls.

Put it next to the €350 target. For a room at €400, the €200 aid brings the young person's share down to €200, well inside the target. For a flat at €1,176, the aid doesn't apply at all, because the rent is above the cap, and even a €1,000 flat would still cost €700 after help. The aid gets young people into shared flats. It doesn't get them a home of their own, and in a market with few homes to let, money handed to tenants tends to end up partly in what landlords ask.

A radical-centre route to €350

The left is right that a country should set itself a public target for what young people pay for housing, and that while the target is missed, those furthest from it deserve direct help. The market-liberal tradition is right that demand subsidies in a short market leak into rents, and that the only lasting way to €350 is a great many more homes to rent, which is what the rest of this week's articles are about, from land to permits.

What fits neither camp is treating the €350 as a measured commitment. Make it an official indicator: the share of a young median salary needed to rent a modest home alone, published every year by the statistics office, reported to Parliament and broken down by city. Then judge every housing measure, tax cuts and aids included, by whether it moves that number. And widen what counts as a home of your own. Small studio flats and new shared-living buildings, with a private room and bathroom and shared kitchens, live or die by regional minimum-size rules; allowing good versions of them puts living alone within reach of a €1,300 salary much sooner than a new flat at €1,176 ever will.

Combined, that is a plan with a number on it. Keep the €300 and €200 aids, targeted at the young people who earn least, while supply catches up. Tie them to the cities where new rental homes are actually being added, so the money and the homes arrive together. And let the indicator tell us, every year, whether we are getting closer to €350. González chose the right number. The work is in making it something Spain measures.