Geography

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

Geography · By the Footnoted editorial team · Published 2026-10-24

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.

If you are weighing a move rather than playing for points, treat each city average as a starting point only: seeing how the neighbourhoods within a city line up on price is where these figures start to be useful.

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 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.

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.

How each figure is collected, city by city

Every answer in the quiz comes from an organisation that sees real sales or real listings, but each one sees them through a different window. Knowing which window explains most of the oddities in the table.

Paris: notarial deeds

In France, every sale of a home is signed before a notary, and the notaries of Paris and the Île-de-France region pool the details of those deeds in a database that also feeds the official Notaires-INSEE price indices. The figures therefore describe prices actually agreed, but they appear a few months after the sales they describe: a Q2 figure published in September covers deeds signed between April and June. The arrondissement figures quoted in the quiz are standardised, which means the notaries adjust for the mix of flats sold so that one arrondissement can be compared with another.

Berlin: every purchase contract

German law requires notaries to send a copy of every property purchase contract to the local valuation committee, the Gutachterausschuss. Berlin's committee therefore sees practically every sale in the city, and its annual market report is close to a census rather than a sample. The price of that completeness is delay: the figure in the quiz covers the whole of 2025 and was published in the summer of 2026.

Madrid and Barcelona: the property registry

The Spanish figures come from the land registrars, who record changes of ownership. A registered price is a price actually paid, as in Paris and Berlin, and it is lower than the prices advertised on property websites, which are what sellers ask. The registrars publish averages for every provincial capital, which is how San Sebastián turns up at the top of the Spanish ranking.

Lisbon: tax records

Statistics Portugal builds its local house price figures from the tax records generated when a home changes hands, and it publishes medians rather than averages. A median is the price per square metre of the sale in the middle of the list, so a handful of very expensive flats on the river front does not drag it upwards.

Vienna: the land register

Statistics Austria also uses a median, calculated from purchases entered in the land register. Its figure is for flats only, which matters because houses on the edge of a city usually cost less per square metre than flats in the centre.

Stockholm: estate agents' reports

Svensk Mäklarstatistik collects the sales reported by estate agents. In Stockholm, most flats are sold as a bostadsrätt: the buyer acquires a share in a housing co-operative that owns the building, with the right to live in one flat, and pays a monthly fee to the co-operative. The price of the share leaves out the co-operative's own loans, which the members repay through that fee, so two flats with the same price per square metre can carry very different costs.

Warsaw: listings and transactions side by side

Poland's central bank is unusual in publishing both asking prices and transaction prices for the same cities, from data gathered from estate agents and other market participants. That is what makes the quiz's question on the gap between the two possible, and it is a useful reminder that a figure read on a listing site is a starting point for negotiation, not a measure of what homes sell for.

Hong Kong: saleable area and size classes

Hong Kong's Rating and Valuation Department sorts flats into classes by saleable area, from class A (under 40 square metres) to class E (160 square metres and above), and publishes average prices for each class in each region. Saleable area counts the floor inside the flat, plus features such as a balcony, but not lifts, lobbies and other common parts, which is why it is smaller than the gross figures used in some markets and why the price per square metre looks so high.

Helsinki: transfer tax data and price zones

Statistics Finland calculates its prices for old dwellings in housing companies from transfer tax data supplied by the Finnish Tax Administration, and splits the larger cities into postal-code zones. Its preliminary figures can be revised when late transactions arrive, so the quiz quotes them as preliminary.

A worked example: one flat, three prices

To see how much the method matters, take an imaginary 50 m² flat in an imaginary city. The numbers here are invented for the arithmetic only; they are not statistics for any real place.

• The seller lists the flat for 300,000 euros: an asking price of 6,000 euros per m².
• After negotiation it sells for 270,000 euros, ten per cent less: a transaction price of 5,400 euros per m².
• The buyer measures it again and finds that the 50 m² included a share of the landing and the stairwell. Measured on saleable area alone, the flat is 45 m², and the same 270,000 euros works out at 6,000 euros per m².

One sale, three honest prices per square metre, and a spread of more than ten per cent between them before anyone has compared two cities. Then add the choice between an average and a median, between new and existing homes, and between the city and its region, and it becomes clear why the table above warns against reading too much into small gaps. Defining a measurement carefully is a recurring theme on Footnoted: the same problem decides which lake counts as the largest lake in the world and why published river lengths disagree on our page about the longest rivers in Africa.

Reading a price per square metre: a checklist

Whether you are checking a quiz answer, a newspaper headline or a listing, these questions sort out most confusions:

1. Asked or paid? Listing prices are hopes; notarial, registry and tax figures are outcomes.
2. Average or median? An average is pulled up by a few luxury sales; a median is not.
3. Which area? The city proper, a district, or a whole metropolitan region can differ by a third or more.
4. Which homes? Flats or houses, new or existing, small or large: each changes the answer.
5. Which floor area? Saleable, net, gross, with or without balconies and common parts.
6. Which period? A quarter, a year, or a rolling twelve months; and how long after the sales the figure was published.
7. Which currency and rate? A conversion on a given day can move a city up or down a ranking without any change in local prices.
8. Level or change? For "how fast are prices rising", use the official index, not two averages a year apart.

How this quiz was put together

Each question was written from a single primary publication, listed below with its date, rather than from press summaries. Where an office publishes several figures for the same city, the quiz uses the broadest one for existing homes and mentions the others in the explanation. Figures in local currencies were converted once, at the European Central Bank reference rates of a single day, and rounded; the ECB publishes these rates for information only, so a bank or exchange office would quote slightly different ones. Provisional and preliminary figures are labelled as such. For readers who want to compare countries rather than cities, Eurostat publishes a harmonised house price index for the European Union, and the OECD and the Bank for International Settlements publish international series of residential property prices; these track changes over time and do not give prices per square metre. The answers will date: a quiz like this is a snapshot of October 2026, and the dates in the table are part of every answer.

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.

Sources

• Chambre des notaires de Paris, prices per m² of existing flats behind the Notaires-INSEE indices, by département and standardised prices by arrondissement (Q2 2026, published September 2026).
• Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin, press release on the Gutachterausschuss property market report 2025/2026 (31 July 2026).
• Colegio de Registradores, Estadística Registral Inmobiliaria, 2nd quarter 2026.
• Statistics Portugal (INE), House prices at local level, 2nd quarter 2026 (23 October 2026).
• Statistik Austria, Immobilien-Durchschnittspreise 2025 (28 May 2026).
• Svensk Mäklarstatistik, Stockholm: prices of bostadsrätter and villas (updated 8 October 2026).
• Narodowy Bank Polski, housing price database (BaRN), Q2 2026: offers current on 1 June 2026, transactions from March to May 2026.
• Hong Kong Rating and Valuation Department, property market statistics: private domestic average prices by class (August 2026, provisional).
• Statistics Finland, table 15is: prices per square metre of old dwellings in housing companies (Q2 2026, preliminary, updated 28 July 2026).
• European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates (23 October 2026).

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