UK’s most and least inexpensive cities – together with the borough the place properties go for 27 occasions the common wage… so how does YOUR space fare?

Homes in Britain’s least affordable borough cost up to 27-times the average salary, data shows.

Kensington and Chelsea, an affluent enclave of West London, ranks just below the City of Westminster at the bottom of the affordability charts.

Residents in the borough earn £44,400, on average. But homes across the borough currently sell for nearly £1.2million, equating to a ratio of 26.7.

For comparison, the affordability ratio is below four in Burnley, Lancashire. 

There, salaries typically sit below the £30,000 mark, with homes reaching just north of £110,000.

It comes as official figures today revealed the affordability ratio across England as a whole is now 8.6 because of spiralling house prices.

Average house prices in England stood at £298,000 for the financial year that ended 2023.

Annual disposable household income – after taxes and benefits – meanwhile, sat at £35,000.

MailOnline’s independent analysis examines median annual pre-tax earnings for residents instead of disposable household income.

Using our measure, the affordability ratio across Britain is 9.3. In England it is 9.7, in Wales 7.3 and in Scotland 6.2.

It took 2024 earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show median incomes in each local authority district.

This was compared against statistics from the Land Registry’s House Price Index for September of this year – the most recent data.

For historical analyses, average earnings for a year in a council area were compared against the average sale price in September of that year from the Land Registry data.

All five of the least affordable boroughs are in London, our analysis showed.

Rounding out the bottom five was the City of Westminster (where homes go for 21.1-times the average salary), Camden (19.7), Hammersmith and Fulham (17.2), and Barnet (16.5).

Outside of London, Chichester in West Sussex came seventh with a ratio of 16.2.

All of the 20 least affordable local authorities in Britain are in London and the South East, bar Cotswold in the South West.

Aside from Cotswold, a local authority area not in London, the South East or the East of England does not feature until 32nd place, with Bath and North East Somerset having a rating of 13.4.

At the other end of the table, Burnley was followed by North Ayrshire (4.3), East Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, and Hyndburn (all 4.4).

All of the ten most affordable local authorities in Britain are in Scotland and the North of England, the data showed.

It comes after separate MailOnline analysis earlier this year suggested that a 35-year-old baby boomer in 1999 found it twice as easy to buy a house than a millennial of the same age last year.

The median house price in 1999 – when the youngest boomers were aged 35 – was £70,000, according to the ONS.

Average earnings for their age group was £16,700. 

This equated to a house price to earnings ratio – effectively a measure of affordability – of 4.2 to 1.

But average property values have shot up by four times since the late 1990s. 

A 35-year-old millennial earning an average full-time annual salary of £32,500 had a house price to earnings ratio of 8.83 to 1.