Quiz: How Much Does a Square Metre Cost in 10 Big Cities?

Geography · Published 2026-10-24

Terracotta rooftops of central Lisbon stretching to the river, with a red suspension bridge in the distance under a cloudy sky — The rooftops of central Lisbon, looking towards the Tagus and the 25 de Abril Bridge. Photo: Seasal87, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How much does a square metre of home cost in a big city? It depends on whose figure you use. This quiz sticks to official or widely used statistics, each with its date, and the notes under the questions explain why two "prices per square metre" for the same city can differ by a quarter or more.

Before you start: what is being measured

A price per square metre sounds simple: the sale price divided by the floor area. Each statistics office does it slightly differently, and the differences matter more than most people expect:

Asking or transaction price. Prices on listing websites are what sellers hope to get. Notaries, land registries and tax offices record what buyers actually paid, usually a few months later. Warsaw is the clearest example below: the central bank publishes both, and in mid-2026 asking prices for resale flats were about 14% above transaction prices.
Average or median. A handful of very expensive sales pulls an average up. A median (the middle sale) is less affected. Lisbon and Vienna publish medians; Paris, Berlin and Helsinki publish averages.
City or metro area. "Paris" can mean the twenty arrondissements or the whole Île-de-France region, where the average is roughly a third lower. Every figure here is for the city itself unless the question says otherwise.
Which homes. Most series cover existing (second-hand) flats; new builds usually cost more. Hong Kong measures "saleable area", which excludes common parts and is smaller than the gross area used in some other markets.

Prices in other currencies are converted at the European Central Bank's reference rates of 23 October 2026 (€1 = 11.131 Swedish kronor, 4.3945 Polish złoty, 8.7793 Hong Kong dollars), rounded. A square metre in Stockholm or Hong Kong is cheaper or dearer in euros from one month to the next even if local prices do not move.

The quiz: 10 cities

The answers, side by side

Here are the ten cities again, ranked by the figure in euros. Read the table as a rough guide only: the rows use different methods, so a gap of a few hundred euros between two cities means very little.

City	Price per m²	≈ €/m²	What it measures	Period
Hong Kong	HK$110,100–155,500	12,500–17,700	Resale flats under 70 m², saleable area, average by region	Aug 2026 (provisional)
Paris	€9,560	9,560	Existing flats, notarised sales, average	Q2 2026
Stockholm	91,997 kr	8,300	Co-operative flats, agent-reported sales, average	Jul–Sep 2026
Madrid	€5,534	5,534	All homes, registered sales, average	Q2 2026
Berlin	€5,511	5,511	Condominium flats, notarised sales, average	2025
Lisbon	€5,299	5,299	All homes, tax records of sales, median	Q2 2026
Vienna	€5,212	5,212	Flats, land-register sales, median	2025
Barcelona	€5,045	5,045	All homes, registered sales, average	Q2 2026
Helsinki	€4,916	4,916	Existing flats and terraced houses in housing companies, average (preliminary)	Q2 2026
Warsaw	16,723 zł	3,800	Resale flats, transactions, average	Q2 2026

The surprise for many players is the middle of the table. Madrid, Berlin, Lisbon, Vienna and Barcelona all sit within about €500 of each other, between roughly €5,000 and €5,550 per m². Lisbon's figure is also moving quickly: Portugal's national median rose 18.4% in a year to Q2 2026, although annual growth in the city of Lisbon itself slowed that quarter.

Why the gap inside a city matters more

Look at Paris and Helsinki again. In Paris, a square metre in the 6th arrondissement cost about €13,980 in Q2 2026, against €7,690 in the 19th: nearly double, a few metro stops apart. In Helsinki, the dearest price zone was close to three times the cheapest. Those gaps are bigger than the difference between most of the capitals in the table. If you are weighing a move rather than playing for points, the useful next step is to compare neighbourhoods within a city side by side, because the spread inside one city is usually wider than the gap between two capitals.

Two more effects push a single city figure around. Small flats cost more per square metre than large ones, because kitchens and bathrooms are expensive to build and fit into every home whatever its size; a city where most sales are studios will look dearer. And the mix of what sells changes from one quarter to the next, which is why statistics offices such as Statistics Finland warn that their average prices per square metre describe price levels, not price changes. For changes over time, they publish separate indices.

Safe quiz answers, as of October 2026: dearest city in this list, Hong Kong; cheapest, Warsaw; Paris, a little under €10,000 per m² for an existing flat; most expensive Spanish capital, San Sebastián; asking prices are higher than transaction prices.