How affordable is it to live in York?
It’s not an easy question to answer. But some new number crunching has revealed what you need to earn per hour to afford a mortgage, according to which postcode you live in.
Not surprisingly, the city centre is the most expensive place in York to buy a home.
In the YO1 postcode you need to earn £26.51 an hour – or £994 a week, or £51,694.50 a year.
At the other end of the scale, in the YO24 postcode, which covers places like Acomb, Dringhouses and Woodthorpe, you need to earn £16.56 an hour – or £621 a week, or £32,292 a year.
Here’s the breakdown
The figures were crunched by the blinds maker web-blinds.co.uk.
It has analysed the average house price in each of Britain’s 2,643 postcodes to find how much would be needed to be earned per hour to live in each area. Try it out here.
Earnings needed to afford a York mortgage
| Postcode | Hourly | Weekly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|---|
| YO1 | £26.51 | £994.13 | £51,694.50 |
| YO23 | £23.46 | £879.75 | £45,747.00 |
| YO19 | £21.76 | £816.00 | £42,432.00 |
| YO26 | £19.79 | £742.13 | £38,590.50 |
| YO32 | £18.20 | £682.50 | £35,490.00 |
| YO10 | £17.41 | £652.88 | £33,949.50 |
| YO30 | £17.11 | £641.63 | £33,364.50 |
| YO31 | £16.69 | £625.88 | £32,545.50 |
| YO24 | £16.56 | £621.00 | £32,292.00 |
Shelter recommends that housing costs should be no more than 35% of income. So they took the cost of the average house in each of Britain’s 2,650 postcodes and worked out mortgage repayments based on having a 20% deposit and taking a 25-year term with a 2.63% interest rate. Next, they divided this figure by 0.35 to show the monthly salary a homeowner would need to buy in a location and divided that by the average number of hours worked in a month (150) to show their hourly salary.
Nine years to buy a house
Meanwhile other research has found that York is the 152nd most expensive place to live in the UK.
That’s out of a total of more than 370 local authorities.
Couples interested in buying a house in York would only have to save for a few months to a year in order to afford a minimum deposit on a home in the area.
To purchase the house outright in York would require nine years’ worth of saving.
The research from MoneySuperMarket also found that…
- the average house price in York is £242,389
- the average joint salary of a couple in York is £53,474
- the average minimum mortgage deposit required in York is £15,124
Kevin Mountford, banking expert at MoneySuperMarket, said: “As house prices continue to rise, the dream of owning a home becomes harder and harder to reach for so many people.
“For those who want to take their first steps onto the ladder, reaching the minimum deposit levels required causes serious financial strain and, as our analysis highlights, many might be priced out of their desired area.”