The price increase preys on middle and low incomes

• Housing and food are becoming more expensive than wages and the cost of living, measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
• Not everyone notices the rise in the cost of living the same way, it depends on everyone's basket: why do lower incomes perceive it especially?
• Housing takes on a leading role when determining the economic situation of families: renting is the residential modality with the highest cost but, paradoxically, it tends to be the one used by families with the least purchasing power.

The 2008 economic crisis ended, at least theoretically, in 2013. It was the last year in which the Spanish economy recorded negative growth. The consequences of the recession still persist today, and are aggravated by the more recent price increase of a very specific group of products in the shopping basket. They are fundamentally two: housing and food, as made clear by the Generalitat in the 2025 Social Report. These two elements are also the main drivers of the general strike called for November 11th.

At ARA we have compared wage growth with that of rents, purchase housing, and food. Between 2013 and 2024 (the last year with available data), the median salary – a measure that avoids being distorted by higher incomes – has grown by 30.7% on average. In contrast, the average rent according to the Generalitat has grown almost double, 55.7%; while, according to Idealista, living as a tenant has soared by 73%. Purchase housing has grown even more, 78.7%. Furthermore, between 2024 and the following year the price jumped 20 points, so that, in 2025, the square meter price practically doubled that of 2013. Filling the fridge has gone up by 43.1%.

"Beyond the price of housing, what is important is how salaries have evolved. If rents have risen a lot, but wages even more, who will complain?", points out Mariona Segú, professor at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. "The problem of access to housing arises because people have to allocate an increasingly larger proportion of their income to it", she summarizes.

A CPI for everyone

However, salaries are evolving above inflation. From 2013 to 2024, the median Catalan salary has increased by 30.6%, while the CPI has done so by 23.4%. This data, at first glance, is positive, as workers' remuneration would not be staying below inflation. However, as explained by the emeritus professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Josep Oliver, the consumer price index (CPI, the indicator that measures the cost of living) “does not take into account the wealth of households”.

Oliver, like the Government, concludes that “the loss of purchasing power is much more pronounced due to the increase in the price of food and rent" for the 25% of the population with the lowest income than for the 25% who earn the most. “The calculation of the CPI comes from a theoretical expenditure of a theoretical family, but it does not reflect any specific family”, he summarizes.

According to the Catalan Government's report, families with lower incomes allocate "a larger part of their budget to basic expenses —housing, energy, and food—, which are precisely the components that have registered the most intense price increases". They are, moreover, "essential and difficult to substitute" products. Since families cannot ignore them, to cope, they tend to "shift spending from other items or reduce their savings margin".

How much has each thing gone up?

If households with lower income tend to spend a large part of their earnings on food or rent, the wealthier ones concentrate the volume of expenses on health, education, or information and communication (for example, telephony, electronic devices, or media). And the costs of each of these concepts have grown differently in recent years.

After the great crisis of 2008, the evolution of the price of the shopping basket was moderate: in six years, from 2013 to 2019, the prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages grew by 9.9%, according to CPI calculations. However, from 2020 to 2025 – with the outbreak of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – this evolution has skyrocketed to 33%. In the accumulated period from 2013 to 2025, the shopping basket has risen by 48%, an increase of almost 18 percentage points above the wage increase.

As pointed out by the professor emeritus of Applied Economics at the UAB, on the other side of the coin are expenses on health, education, or communication, which are the most representative goods for families with higher incomes. Since 2013, all these expenses have risen much more modestly and by percentages below the average inflation rate. Specifically, health costs have risen by 12.8% and those earmarked for education by 14.1%. It is worth noting that expenses on communication and information have not increased; on the contrary, they have become 8.80% cheaper over the last 13 years. Energy prices also tend to have a greater impact on families with more resources, although these have also skyrocketed following the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Oliver stresses that, "for the first time," the "children of the middle class" are also suffering from the loss of purchasing power, which until now was limited to the "more subordinate classes." Among the segments of the population with higher income, for example, it is considered that rental prices do not have such a significant impact, since it is more likely that they own their homes, which is not taken into account when calculating the CPI.

Shopping becomes more expensive than rent

Finding and paying for a home is the main headache for Catalans. The purchase price has risen more than the rental price and, in both cases, they have grown above wages. However, just as with the CPI, the increases do not affect all of society in the same way. Two phenomena converge in renting: on the one hand, it is the residential modality with a higher average cost; and, on the other, it concentrates people with lower incomes than in the purchase regime.

According to an economics note published by the Generalitat, on average, housing expenses "are systematically much higher" for tenants than for people with a home they own. Beyond the absolute figure, they also take a larger slice of the pie: "They represent a much more substantial part of budgets". According to the ECV, 25% of families living in rented accommodation in Catalonia allocate more than 40% of their income to housing, compared to 3.2% of families in this situation who are paying a mortgage.

In 2025, the average cost of living in a rented home was 7,200 euros per year, and the cost of owning a home but with an outstanding mortgage was 1,947 euros per year, according to a study published by Fedea (Spanish financial sector foundation) regarding all of Spain, not just Catalonia. Following the guidelines of the European Union's statistical office, Eurostat, the authors at Fedea only count mortgage interest, and not the repayment of the original amount borrowed from the bank (i.e., the principal): they consider that mortgage interest and rent are money spent with no return, while returning the money borrowed from the bank to buy the home "reduces debt and increases wealth".

Housing, a differential starting point

All of this leads the authors of the Fedea study to conclude that the housing tenure regime – market rent, below-market, mortgage purchase, full ownership – plays an increasingly important role in determining a family's economic capacity. "Two families with a similar income can have very different resources left after paying rent, a mortgage, utilities, and common expenses," they assert.

The president of the Catalan Economy Commission of the Association of Economists of Catalonia (CEC), Josep Reyner, states that the demand to buy housing "is contained" and that "it would be much higher if the population had more purchasing power." According to the Bank of Spain, in 2021, three out of every four renting families had serious difficulties buying a property in their municipality. "Buying and selling at the moment is limited to much more specific sectors of the population, to the highest strata of society," concludes Reyner.

Mariona Segú warns that "moving from tenant to owner is becoming more complicated." According to Idescat, while in 2013 there were 75.3% of families living in a home they owned, in 2024 it was 67.2%. Segú stresses that the housing crisis leads to a "vicious circle": prices go up, so I spend more on rent and cannot save to gather the down payment for an apartment." These difficulties add more demand to the rental market. In the analyzed period, 186,900 families have been created in Catalonia, but the growth is uneven: there are about 89,000 fewer families that own their own home but about 300,000 more that live in rented housing. This is explained by demographic changes and the arrival of immigrants, who tend to have low or medium income levels.

From restraint to salary improvements

Beyond the price of housing, in recent years there have been two major stages marked by the different labor policies in the State. The austerity policies that were applied during the crisis had effects on the pockets of Catalans. And the wage freeze did not end with the economic recovery, but rather dragged on for a few more years. Specifically, from 2013 to 2019, the median salary in Catalonia rose by a limited 7.4%, partly the result of wage containment policies (what economists call internal devaluation) promoted by Brussels. Since then, however, the increase has been 21% in five years, a much higher increase.

To understand this change of direction, it is worth remembering different policies that have pushed towards unfreezing wages, such as the rise in the minimum interprofessional wage or the progress of collective bargaining. The increase in the SMI has been constant since 2017, and saw a big jump in 2019, when it went from 736 euros to 900 euros. Currently, it is set at 1,221 euros, and for next year a 5.3% rise is expected which is still pending approval. The increase in the SMI has a very large impact among those who earn the least: for the 10% of workers with the lowest incomes, since 2015, the salary has increased by 53.3%. This impact is much more moderate if we go up to the 25% with higher income, where it has only risen by 30%.

Furthermore, in 2018, unions and employers sealed the fourth Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), where fixed salary increases were agreed upon. Today, the talks for a sixth AENC are broken. “The employers are entrenched,” pointed out to ARA the general secretary of UGT of Catalonia, Camil Ros, who, just like his counterpart from CCOO of Catalonia, Belén López, considered that the business fabric “seems” to be “waiting for their own to arrive.” The agreement serves to mark the master lines that are later transferred to collective agreements.