How the deposit tool works

The house price is the median sale price for your area in the year ending September 2025, published by ONS. Areas are local authorities, plus the regions and countries ONS publishes alongside them. Median means half of homes sold for less. A flat or a terrace will usually cost less than this figure.

Your salary is yours to set. We start you at the median for your area, from the same ONS release. We do this because there is no official figure for what a 25 year old earns in one named local authority, and we would rather give you the control than invent a number.

What you save is also yours to set. We start at 10% of your pay. We deliberately do not model your rent, your tax and your bills to produce a savings figure, because that chain of assumptions is where numbers like this stop being trustworthy.

We do not add interest on your savings, and we assume house prices stay where they are. Both choices make the answer more conservative, not less.

The chart shows median house price divided by median gross annual workplace-based earnings, 1997 to 2025, from the same ONS release. The line at five times earnings is ONS’s own affordability threshold, not ours.

What this cannot tell you. The median home is not necessarily the home you would buy. Many people on a median wage share with partners, friends or strangers, or live with parents, so the market rate for a whole property overstates what they actually pay. We have not adjusted for that, for two reasons. Those people are still paying a cost, even if it does not show up in rent. And the fact that sharing is normal well into your thirties is itself the thing we are campaigning about.

Coverage is England and Wales. The ONS affordability series does not cover Scotland or Northern Ireland, which use different sources and different methods. We would rather say so than show you a number we cannot stand behind.

The earlier version of this tool was built by Adam Kessler. Two of the caveats above are his.

Data: ONS, Ratio of house price to workplace-based earnings, 1997 to 2025. Retrieved 2026-08-25. Open Government Licence v3.0.