Data from flatshare site SpareRoom – comparing the shortfall between average room rents and the amount people can afford to spend on rent – reveals that Twickenham, a high-demand suburban town in Greater London, has the biggest affordability gap in the country. The average rent now outstrips the average budget by £152 per month, meaning renters need to find an additional £1,827 a year to live there.
It’s a similar story on the other side of London in Barnet, where the average room rent is now £899 per month, or £1,361 per year higher than the average renter’s budget. But this isn’t a problem isolated to the outskirts of the capital.
In the West Midlands market town of Stourbridge, which is well connected to Birmingham by rail, rents are also ahead of budgets by £119 per month.
Of the cities that feature in the top 30, it’s Londonderry, Edinburgh and York that have the biggest gaps between average budgets and rents. At £823 per month, Edinburgh is now the second most expensive city in which to rent, after London, but the average flatsharer only has £716 per month to spend.
West London is the most unaffordable area of the capital for renters. An average budget of £978 might be close to the London average rent of £980, but it’s not enough for this part of town, where average room rents are now in four figures at £1,040 per month.
Fierce demand for rooms post pandemic forced rents up to record levels. Although rent rises have since cooled as demand has returned to normal levels, rents haven’t fallen because demand has consistently outweighed supply. UK rents in Q2 2025 were 24% higher than the same period in 2019. And in almost all major towns and cities, rent increases have been far higher.
Sharing is the cheapest way to rent, and yet a March 2025 survey by SpareRoom of 6,524 flatsharers found three quarters are now spending more than 30% of their take-home pay on rent, and 26% are spending more than half. In London, the affordability issue is considerably worse with eight in 10 spending more than 30% of their pay on rent and 28% spending more than half. In the same survey, 42% of UK renters considered their rent to be unaffordable, rising to 49% in London.
Affordability is now such a problem that just over half of flatsharers (51%) have relied on some form of loan, credit, advance or a second income stream to help them pay their rent in the past 12 months. In an August 2025 survey of 3,775 flatsharers, 19% had used their overdrafts, 18% had needed a loan, 14% had taken on a second job and 13% had used credit cards to pay their rent. Another 6% had either used a payday loans provider or a ‘buy now pay later’ provider in the past year. Under 30s were more likely to have taken on second jobs to help pay their rent (17%), and more likely to be using their overdrafts to pay their rent (22%).
Matt Hutchinson, director of flatshare site SpareRoom, comments: “Rents have been stabilising over the past year which is masking the huge problems people are facing around affordability. Flatsharers’ budgets simply aren’t meeting asking prices set by agents and landlords in many parts of the UK. That means people are having to lean on parents and relatives, take on second jobs and explore various ways of borrowing to be able to pay their rent each month. The fact that over a quarter of under 30s now flatsharing have relied on their parents to be able to start renting in the first place – i.e. with a deposit loan – shows just how hard it is to leave home at all.”
Olivia Harris, chief executive at Dolphin Living, said: “(This) highlights yet again what a high proportion of median income Londoners are paying in rent at 41.6%. This is significantly above all other areas of England and once again demonstrates the unique challenges the capital faces when it comes to housing.
"It is also significantly above the 30% that is considered affordable and above the third of median earnings on which the Mayor of London’s London Living Rents are based. That in several Inner London Boroughs we have households paying rent equivalent to over 50% of median earnings, means that we risk losing huge swathes of critical workers who need to work within London, yet cannot afford to live here. This affordability challenge risks being further compounded by the number of private landlords leaving the market and further reducing supply.”
