Want a house in Sydney? That'll be 14.7x the average wage.

🏆 Sydney is now the most expensive city to buy a home

Forget Hong Kong. Forget New York. Sydney has officially taken the crown — for the worst reason. The least affordable homes on earth. 

Over the weekend, ABC finance reporter Alan Kohler dropped a bombshell: the median dwelling price in Sydney (that’s houses and apartments) hit $1.2 million in May.

That’s a 0.5% jump in just one month.

At this rate, we may never eat avocado toast again.

📉 Homes now cost 14.7 times the median wage

Based on new ABS data, Kohler called Australia’s housing market a “genuine emergency”.

And to be clear:

• The median NSW wage is around $81,000.
  

• The median Sydney home is now $1.2 million.
  

That’s a price-to-income ratio of 14.7. This is deemed impossibly unaffordable by researchers from California’s Chapman University.

🌏 The global report that tracks this every year

A key source on housing affordability is the Demographia report from California’s Chapman University.

Every year it ranks cities by how unaffordable they are based on house prices vs. income.

Historically, Hong Kong has been #1.

But thanks to Sydney’s fresh price hike, we’ve overtaken them — their ratio is now 14.4 and trending downward. Ours? Not so much.

📊 Read the full report here

😬 Cool city… but world’s least affordable?

Let’s be real. Sydney is great — beaches, food, good energy.

But more expensive than New York? London? Really?

After a few months of living here, it’s… not adding up. The quality-of-life gap versus the price? Is low key a bit cooked. Will give credit though, Taronga Zoo does go pretty hard. 

🏡 “Move to the regions” isn’t that simple

You’ve probably heard it – either by old dudes in the media, politicians, or your mate’s landlord parents – why not just move out of the major cities? And yes, regional housing is cheaper. But prices are rising there too.

In regional NSW Prices have already jumped 2.6% this year, with the median home now valued at over $780,000. 

And “just move to the regions” ignores a lot:

• Family ties
  

• Jobs
  

• Infrastructure
  

• Services
  

Also: the national average dwelling price has just cracked $1 million. 

Gone are the days when your dad was buying a block of land for $20K so he had somewhere to park the jet-skis.

📈 Official ABS data here

🧾 What will the government actually do?

With housing this unaffordable, will we see real reforms? Ideas have been floated in the past. Things like:

• Scrapping the capital gains tax discount

• Ending negative gearing

But neither of these things has happened. Why? Well there are a lot of factors involved but it can really boil down to the fact that enough people have a lot of money tied up in housing. So as long that remains the majority no government would consider making changes. 

Right now, nothing suggests political appetite for meaningful change — even as the stats scream for it.

🇦🇺 We hate being last. But what about being first (in the worst way)?

Australians notoriously hate underperforming.

Just look at the mental gymnastics we did to say we’d “won” the Olympics on a per-capita basis.

📉 Yes, that actually happened

But when it comes to housing?

We’re apparently fine being #1 — for unaffordability.

Huh.