Analysts have revealed a portion of the mortgage salary paid by residents of million-plus cities

Residents of eight of Russia's 16 million-plus cities are faced with a situation where they need to spend more than half of their income on paying off a mortgage loan for a new apartment. This conclusion was reached by analysts of URBAN real estate projects who conducted a market study, which was reviewed by Izvestia on October 27.

Two criteria were chosen for him: the ratio of the monthly mortgage payment on the loan to the nominal salary in the region and the required amount of payments (loan body plus interest), expressed in nominal monthly salary. Analysts compared the current results in cities with millions of inhabitants with the figures that were recorded three years ago.

According to the study, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg demonstrate the most positive dynamics in terms of mortgage burden. Novosibirsk residents now need to contribute 45.5% of their salary to service a loan for an average "two-dollar bill" instead of the previous 63.2%.

"In recent years, the housing markets of all the listed cities have expanded — the volume of supply on the market has doubled. At the same time, developers actually curtailed experiments with premium real estate and brought mainly classic comfort and mass business to the market," explained Olga Khasanova, CEO and founder of Urban real estate projects.

But in Kazan, the proportion of monthly payments was slightly reduced (from 77.5% to 72.3%) only by increasing the total loan amount by 20 monthly salaries. Despite this relaxation, a resident of Kazan, on average, has to pay twice as much to repay a loan as, for example, a resident of Krasnoyarsk (37.1%, the minimum among cities with a population of over 1 million people).

In Perm, Rostov-on-Don, and Voronezh, household incomes are growing slightly faster than mortgage costs. According to data for 2022, home buyers in these cities were forced to transfer more than half of their salaries to banks every month, currently this figure has decreased to 44-48%.

In relation to the Chelyabinsk, St. Petersburg, Samara and Omsk regions, the increase was rather symbolic — within 2 percentage points. Residents of Volgograd and Krasnodar are already less comfortable — in these cities, the share of mortgage payments increased by 3.1 percentage points (from 43.2% to 46.3% and from 50.7% to 53.8%, respectively).

Housing in the Ufa market has lost its accessibility especially noticeably. In 2022, the purchase of a standard two-room apartment here cost 52.5% of the average monthly salary, in 2025 - 57.9%. In other words, the capital of Bashkortostan is almost equal to Nizhny Novgorod and St. Petersburg.

Credit pressure increased the most in Moscow. In the autumn of 2022, it was measured 61.5% — better than in Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod or Novosibirsk and almost on a par with Yekaterinburg. In three years, this indicator has risen by 11.9 percentage points.

Empty waiting: price growth in the primary housing market exceeded 10%

With a further reduction in the key rate, there is a risk of a jump in the cost of apartments in new buildings, experts say.

A day earlier, Izvestia got acquainted with a study by analysts at Metrium, who studied the segment of new buildings in the capital at the finishing stage with the most attractive average cost per square meter. So, there are about 24 projects in the mass segment at the stage of finishing buildings. They include 2.9 thousand apartments and apartments with an average price of 356 thousand rubles per 1 sq. m.

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