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The world's most expensive cities to buy an apartment, ranked

Apartment prices in Europe's biggest cities keep climbing. Euronews ranked 28 markets by what one square meter now costs

Housing has turned into one of Europe's hardest political problems, and the shortage of new homes is only half of it, with price making up the rest. In city centers, dense urban districts, and the tourist destinations where outside money competes with local wages, apartments cost far more than ordinary earnings support. Buyers who want to own rather than rent start with the price of a square meter in the city center, because the mortgage and the deposit both follow from it, along with the years of saving that come first. An apartment of the same size can cost several times more in one European capital than in another two hours away by plane, and the difference has almost nothing to do with the flats themselves.

Averaged across the 28 European cities measured for 2026, a square meter of city-center apartment space costs €9,090, which puts an 80-square-meter flat at roughly €727,000 before tax, agent fees, and interest enter the calculation. The spread behind that average runs wide, as buyers in some European cities pay more than €20,000 per square meter while in others the same space costs under €3,000, so an identical floor plan can mean a lifetime of saving in one country and a manageable purchase in the next. Outside Europe the range stretches further still, running from €23,790 per square meter in Hong Kong to €784 in Cairo, where an entire 80-square-meter apartment costs less than €63,000.

Euronews drew its 2026 data from the Deutsche Bank Research Institute study "Mapping the World's Prices 2026," which covers city-center apartment costs across 69 cities around the globe, with 28 located in Europe. Numbeo and Deutsche Bank supplied the underlying data, and every price appears in euros, converted at the exchange rates the European Central Bank averaged over the first six months of 2026. Only four European cities push the price of an 80-square-meter apartment past the €1 million mark, and one of them trails just behind Hong Kong as the second-priciest market on Earth. Among the five largest economies in Europe, just two have capital cities among the continent's 10 priciest markets, and the rest of that group is spread across Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Nordic capitals.

A square meter of city-center apartment space in Zurich costs €22,910, the highest price Euronews found among the 28 European cities measured in the Deutsche Bank Research Institute report. An 80-square-meter flat at that rate costs roughly €1,833,000, a total that lands just short of €2 million. Measured against the €9,090 average across those 28 cities, a Zurich buyer pays about two and a half times the going rate for identical floor space, and the same 80 square meters bought at that average would run €727,000, leaving a gap of more than €1.1 million on a single purchase.

Only one city in the full 69-market survey prices apartments higher. Hong Kong runs €23,790 per square meter, €880 above Zurich, which leaves less than 4% between the most expensive place in the world to buy a flat and the most expensive one in Europe. Seoul ranks third worldwide at €21,897, putting the three priciest markets on the planet within €1,893 of one another. London, the next European entry behind the two Swiss cities, costs €17,241 per square meter, so Zurich prices run roughly a third higher than those in the dearest market in the U.K.

Switzerland ranks as the most expensive country for city-center property on the strength of two markets rather than one, since Geneva also clears €19,000 per square meter in Deutsche Bank's figures. No other country in the report has a single city above that level, and the Swiss have two. Only four European cities in the report cross €1 million for 80 square meters, and Zurich clears that mark by more than €800,000. Even 40 square meters, half the size of the benchmark flat used in the report, runs more than €916,000 at Zurich rates, nearly €190,000 above the €727,000 price of an 80-square-meter apartment at the 28-city average. Buying half the floor space in Zurich, then, costs more than buying a full-size flat in an average European city on the list.

Geneva is the second Swiss city priced above every other European market, at €19,439 per square meter in the center, roughly €3,500 under Zurich, though the distance from Geneva to the rest of the continent runs far wider. Across the 28 European cities Euronews compiled from Deutsche Bank Research Institute figures, a city-center square meter averages €9,090, so a Geneva buyer pays more than double the typical European price for the same space. An 80-square-meter apartment in Geneva runs about €1,555,000, better than €800,000 above the €727,000 European average for an identical floor plan.

Switzerland ranks as the costliest country in Europe for city-center property on the strength of its two entries, and Geneva's price does as much to produce that result as Zurich's. Geneva costs about 13% more per square meter than London's €17,241, the highest price outside Switzerland, and about 52% more than Paris at €12,771, which means half again as much for every square meter of the same........

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