Guide
Does a high house price index mean an expensive country?
An index measures movement, not price
A house price index of 167 does not mean houses cost more there than where the index reads 120. It means prices moved more since 2015. A cheap country with a hot decade outranks an expensive one that stood still — the opposite of what the number seems to say.
What 2015 = 100 actually claims
Official house price indices are rebased so that 2015 equals 100. An index of 167.3 says prices are 67 % above their own 2015 level — in that country, against that country’s past. It says nothing about the level: Turkey’s index dwarfs Switzerland’s while Swiss homes cost multiples more.
We ranked this field under the label "House prices" until 1 August 2026, when a design review concluded the label promised a price level the data does not carry. It is now labelled house price growth since 2015, which is what it is.
What to use instead
For "are homes getting further out of reach right now", use real year-on-year growth — inflation-adjusted, base-independent, comparable across ~60 countries. For "what does a home actually cost there", no free official cross-country source exists, and we would rather show you nothing than a crowdsourced guess. That gap is real, and pretending otherwise is how comparison sites go wrong.
The data this guide is about