For years, politicians, banks and the media have told workers that the main barrier to buying a home is saving a deposit. Work hard, tighten your belt, skip a few luxuries, and eventually you’ll get your foot on the property ladder. But new figures show what many working people already know from bitter experience: even after saving a deposit, millions still can’t afford a home because their wages are too low.
Research from mortgage broker Joseph Lane reveals the salary needed to buy the average first home across seven major UK cities. In London, a buyer would need to earn around £94,200 to purchase the average first home, assuming a lender will allow borrowing of 4.5 times annual salary. Yet the average salary in the capital sits at roughly £40,000. Even a couple both earning the average wage would struggle to meet the threshold required by lenders.
The situation isn’t confined to London. First-time buyers in Bristol need around £63,000, while buyers in Manchester require approximately £46,600. In Liverpool the figure is roughly £38,000, and in Glasgow around £36,600.
As Joseph Lane put it: “More and more, first-time buyers reach their target of saving for a deposit only to find that they still cannot purchase a property in their chosen area. This is because their salary doesn’t meet the mortgage criteria.”
He added: “Generally speaking, especially in the likes of London, the average worker is earning much less than required by the average lender. Of course, a deposit plays an instrumental role in getting onto the property ladder, but affordability has quietly been dominating the 2026 scene. Ultimately, buyers are finding themselves priced out as their salaries haven’t kept up with the rise of house prices.”
The key point is right there in Lane’s statement. Salaries haven’t kept up with house prices. Under capitalism, wages and housing costs don’t move together because they aren’t determined by the same forces.
Workers sell their labour power and receive wages that are constantly held down by employers seeking to maximise profits. Housing, meanwhile, has increasingly been transformed from a place to live into an investment asset. Homes are bought and sold not according to social need but according to their ability to generate returns for landlords, banks, property developers and speculators.
The result is a growing contradiction. The working class produces society’s wealth, but finds itself increasingly unable to afford the basic necessities of life. Housing is one of the clearest examples.
For decades, successive governments have encouraged this process. Social housing has been sold off, council house construction has been gutted, planning systems have been shaped around private developers, and cheap credit has been used to inflate property values. Rising house prices are celebrated as economic success because they benefit property owners and financial institutions, even as they make housing less affordable for everyone else.
Banks are often presented as neutral arbiters simply applying affordability rules. In reality, they’re enforcing the logic of a system where access to shelter depends on profitability and debt. A worker may be perfectly capable of paying rent month after month, often at a level higher than a potential mortgage payment, yet still be denied a mortgage because they fail to meet lending criteria.
Lorna Hopes of Smith & Pinching acknowledged the problem, stating: “The sheer size of the deposit they need leads many first-time buyers to fixate on the number as if it’s the only target that matters. This is understandable, as many will have saved for years to reach this point. But in truth, having a big enough deposit is only half the story.
“Having a sufficiently large and reliable income matters just as much, if not more.”
The Financial Conduct Authority has responded by introducing measures intended to make it easier for first-time buyers, self-employed workers and older borrowers to access mortgages. Banks are also being encouraged to take a more lenient view of applicants with past credit issues.
Yet these reforms leave the fundamental problem untouched. Making it slightly easier to access debt doesn’t change the fact that house prices have risen far beyond what ordinary workers can afford. Nor does it address the reality that wages have stagnated while housing has become an increasingly lucrative vehicle for capital accumulation.
Mortgage experts advise would-be buyers to improve their credit scores or search for homes in different areas. But these individual solutions simply shift responsibility onto workers themselves. The problem isn’t that millions of people have chosen the wrong area or failed to manage their finances properly. The problem is that housing under capitalism is organised around profit rather than human need.
As Marxists have long argued, capitalism creates scarcity amid abundance. Britain possesses the resources, labour and technical capacity to ensure everyone has access to secure and affordable housing. What’s standing in the way isn’t a lack of homes but a system that treats homes as commodities.
The growing gap between wages and house prices isn’t an accident or policy mistake. It’s the predictable outcome of an economic system in which landlords, banks and property developers accumulate wealth while working people are expected to shoulder ever larger debts simply to secure a place to live.
For a growing section of the working class, home ownership is no longer a realistic aspiration. It’s becoming a privilege reserved for those with unusually high incomes, inherited wealth, or family support. The housing crisis isn’t merely a housing crisis. It’s another expression of the broader contradiction between capital and labour that runs through British society.
