Does the price of housing rise more with Isabel Díaz Ayuso than with Salvador Illa?

GironaPedro Sánchez visited this ThursdayLa revuelta by David Broncano in an interview lasting more than an hour, with a joking and relaxed tone, but also with criticism and pointed questions. One of the hottest topics was housing and, when asked about the socialists' measures on this matter, the president cited the 2023 Housing Law, which gives autonomous communities tools to regulate rent caps. However, the regional governments led by PP and Vox have refused to apply it and, to highlight the alleged grievance with those that have done so, Sánchez said that "in Catalonia the increase in rent prices is clearly lower than that of the Community of Madrid". But is that really the case?

The Generalitat de Catalunya, during the time of Pere Aragonès' Esquerra government, was the first autonomous community to apply this regulation, in March 2024. It prepared technical studies to determine which municipalities were suffering from housing access problems and declared them Stressed Residential Market Zones (ZMRT). Initially, 140 were declared, including Barcelona and a good part of the metropolitan area, and subsequently Salvador Illa's government has expanded the list to 302. Since the measure came into force, the average price of rental contracts in Catalonia has not only not increased but has registered a decrease of 0.88%. Despite the increase in the CPI, it closed the first quarter of 2026 at 861.23 euros per month, compared to the 868.91 euros before the law. The same trend is occurring in the stressed zones, where prices have fallen by 1.3% over the last two years.

In the Community of Madrid, on the other hand, where the Popular Party's Isabel Díaz Ayuso has governed with an absolute majority since 2023, the refusal to apply the state housing law has kept the market under a dynamic of free competition. Without executive intervention in rental prices, there is no official data on the evolution of prices in the community comparable to the Catalan ones, so one must be guided by advertisements from real estate portals, which do not reflect the entire supply. The available data point, in any case, to a continuous escalation of rental prices, from approximately €17 per m² to an average of 21 throughout the community over the last two years, according to Idealista. An increase of 23.5%. According to the same portal, in Catalonia the average price per m² has barely varied and remains at around €15. Certainly, a substantial difference, just as Sánchez pointed out on La Revuelta.

Regarding the buying and selling market, where rent caps have no direct effect, both Catalonia and the Community of Madrid have maintained an upward trend, although with greater intensity in Madrid, where it has increased by 12.85% year-on-year, compared to 10.12% in the Catalan case, according to INE data from the second quarter of 2026.

For an 'expat' it is more economical to live in Barcelona than in Madrid

However, some experts point out that, despite these evident differences between Madrid and Catalonia, the rent containment measures applied by the Generalitat have not served to solve the root problem of access to housing, since they have not resolved essential issues such as the imbalance between high demand and low supply. "Even if you regulate the market, apartments continue to be taken by people with more purchasing power, since landlords prefer to rent to an expat with high income than to a migrant family with fewer resources," says Òscar Gorgues, manager of the Barcelona Urban Property Chamber.

And he continues: "If you freeze prices, it is causing people with greater economic capacity to have to make less of an effort to pay rent to live in Barcelona than, for example, in Madrid." Therefore, beyond regulating prices, real estate market analysts point to the need to increase the private and public supply of housing, with tax incentives, legal certainty, and construction stimuli, areas in which, precisely, the Madrid executive has indeed incentivized more than the Catalan one.