For young people in Britain trying to buy a first home, where you look may matter as much as when. A new analysis ranking the country's most affordable cities for first-time buyers puts Stoke-on-Trent firmly in front, and underlines how far the odds of getting onto the property ladder now vary from place to place.
The "starter cities" index, produced by the estate agency Savills and reported by the Guardian, assessed 30 of the UK's largest cities on how easily a first-time buyer could afford to buy there. In Stoke-on-Trent, the most affordable of them, the average flat costs about £88,448, against average local earnings of roughly £35,079, with a one-bedroom flat renting for around £664 a month.
How the ranking works
The index draws on average second-hand flat prices up to 2025, local workplace earnings and typical asking rents for one-bedroom flats, using data from Savills, Oxford Economics and the Land Registry. Its central measure is the ratio between the price of a flat and local income: the lower the multiple, the more within reach a purchase is for someone earning a typical local wage.
By that yardstick, Stoke-on-Trent leads with a price-to-income ratio of about 2.5. Hull follows at roughly 2.7 and Derby at about 2.9, the only cities where flats cost less than three times local earnings. The rankings also reward cities where buying compares well with renting, and where populations are growing as people move in.
A northern tilt
The rest of the top 10, according to the index, takes in Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Plymouth, Southampton, Cardiff, Glasgow and Norwich. The overall picture is a familiar one in British housing: affordability clusters in the north of England, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales, while cities in the south-east, and London above all, sit far out of reach on the same measures.
Glasgow illustrates the trade-offs. Though it makes the list, flats there average close to £195,800, well above the cheapest cities, with higher local earnings only partly closing the gap. Affordability, the ranking makes clear, is about the relationship between prices, wages and rents, not simply the cheapest headline price.
What it means for buyers
For first-time buyers weighing whether to keep renting or to buy, and increasingly whether to move to do so, the appeal of the leading cities is that a monthly mortgage can undercut the rent on a comparable flat. Stoke-on-Trent, with its sub-£90,000 flats and low rents, is presented as the clearest example.
None of this erases the wider squeeze on younger buyers from years of rising prices and higher borrowing costs. But rankings like this one offer a practical reminder that, in a country of sharp regional divides, the same salary and deposit can mean very different things depending on the map.
