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

GironaPedro Sánchez visited La Revuelta this Thursday by David Broncano in an interview lasting over 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 in this regard, the president cited the 2023 Housing Law, which gives autonomous communities tools to regulate rent caps. The regional governments led by the PP and Vox, however, have refused to apply it, and to highlight the alleged grievance compared to those that have, Sánchez said that "in Catalonia the increase in rent prices is clearly lower than in 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 carried out technical studies to determine which municipalities were suffering from problems accessing housing and declared them Stressed Residential Market Zones (ZMRT). Initially, 140 were declared, including Barcelona and a large 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 recorded a decrease of 0.9%. Despite the increase in the CPI, it closed the first quarter of 2026 at 861.23 euros per month, compared to 868.91 euros before the law.

In the Community of Madrid, on the other hand, where the popular 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 community's price trends comparable to those in Catalonia, so one must be guided by listings on real estate portals, which do not reflect the entire supply. The available data point, in any case, to a continuous escalation of rental prices, approximately from €1,400 to €1,600 (a 14%) throughout the community over the last two years. Certainly, a substantial difference from Catalonia, just as Sánchez pointed out in 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, according to experts, despite these evident differences between Madrid and Catalonia, the rent control measures applied by the Generalitat have not served to solve the problem of access to housing at its root, as 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 higher purchasing power, since owners prefer to rent to an expat with high income than to a migrant family with fewer resources," says Òscar Gorgues, manager of the Urban Property Chamber of Barcelona.

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