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The price of housing has doubled in Malaga in just 12 yearsThe price per square metre rises by 14.9 per cent in the province in the last year and sets a new record
Friday, 20 February 2026, 14:07
The price of housing in Malaga - and, in fact, across Spain as a whole - shows no sign of peaking.
It closed 2025 at a new all-time high of 2,897.3 euros per square metre, after rising by 14.9 per cent over the course of the year.
This makes Malaga province the fifth most expensive province in Spain to buy a property after Madrid, the Balearic Islands, Guipúzcoa and Barcelona. This data has been published this week by the ministry of housing and takes as a reference the real estate appraisals carried out in the last year (and therefore do not correspond to the completion of sales transactions).
The price per square metre of free-market housing in Malaga continues to rise from the lows recorded in the fourth quarter of 2013 (1,447.2 euros) following five years of a severe economic, financial and property crisis.
By the end of last year, its price had doubled from those levels. But it is also still increasing beyond the previous highs, those reached just before the property bubble burst in 2008; specifically, its value is now 23.4 per cent above those levels (2,348.3 euros per square metre).
If we go back to what happened last year, the value of the square metre of housing in Malaga is not only the fifth highest in Spain (and the highest in Andalucía), but it is also almost 30 per cent higher than the national average (2,230 euros per square metre).
Slight loss of steam?
But there is also relevant data that may suggest a slight loss of steam in relative terms. In the third quarter of 2025, the rate of increase in house prices in Malaga was 16.1 per cent, the fastest in Spain. At the end of the year, this rate had slowed to 14.9 per cent, and there are a handful of territories that beat this figure, such as Valencia, Cantabria, Madrid and Segovia. However, the Costa del Sol province continues to beat the average increase recorded in the country (13.1 per cent).
This is because in the fourth quarter it seems to have put the brakes on: between September and December 2025, housing in Malaga rose by 2.2 per cent, compared to the 4.6 per cent recorded in the previous three months. In this case, Malaga was below the Spanish average, which recorded a rise of 3.6 per cent.
223,611 euros
is the average mortgage signed in Malaga in 2025, making it the third most expensive province in Spain
In parallel to the data from the ministry of housing, the national statistics institute (INE) has published the balance of the mortgage market for the year 2025. According to this data, Malaga continues to have the third most expensive mortgage in Spain, having increased by more than 14 per cent in the last year, with an average of 223,611 euros.
This is only behind the Balearic Islands (around 283,000 euros) and Madrid (more than 255,000 euros) and ahead of Barcelona (less than 200,000 euros). The average mortgage loan signed in Spain in 2025 was 163,738 euros.
Despite the rise in the cost of housing, which has gone hand in hand with the increase in the amount of mortgages, the number of loans taken out last year grew by 12.7 per cent in the province, to 22,750. This is below the 17.75 per cent increase recorded in Spain as a whole, where more than half a million loans were signed, its highest figure since 2010.
A third study published this week, in this case by the property portal Idealista, links house prices — using asking prices from listings on its platform as a benchmark, rather than valuations or completed transaction prices — with mortgage repayments and households’ disposable income.
According to this report, Malaga is the second provincial capital in Spain, after Palma de Mallorca, where buying a two-bedroom home requires the greatest financial effort: an average household in the city needs to set aside 37 per cent of its income to pay the mortgage instalment.
In addition, according to Idealista, it is the fifth Spanish capital — after Palma, San Sebastián, Madrid and Barcelona — that requires the largest amount of savings upfront to cover the deposit: 96,651 euros.
A third figure emerges from the report published by the aforementioned property portal: the average monthly mortgage payment in the city of Malaga is 1,045 euros, whereas a reasonable level - one that would not absorb more than 30 per cent of household resources - should not exceed 845 euros.
However, according to Idealista’s data, only 25 per cent of all the homes currently for sale in the city are priced at a level that would make it possible to take out a mortgage without consuming an excessive proportion of household income.