HIPOTECALC ANALYTICS / IHEC
How we calculate the IHEC
How many estimated annual household incomes an 80 m² home costs at asking prices. A comparable measure across 100 Spanish municipalities.
By Equipo Hipotecalc · Published 8 September 2026
Source cutoff: 7 September 2026 · Edition 2026-09-07-v1 · Methodology 1.0
What the index measures
The IHEC compares the asking price of a standard 80 m² home with estimated annual household income in the municipality. A value of 8 means the reference property is priced at eight times estimated annual household income. It does not mean eight years of saving, nor the share of income spent on mortgage payments.
IHEC = (asking price €/m² × 80 m²) / estimated annual household income
A fixed sample, not a national average
The workbook covers the 100 most populous municipalities at 1 January 2025. We retain the same sample throughout 2023–2026. This is a retrospective selection: these were not necessarily the 100 largest municipalities in every historical year. Each municipality has equal weight in the median; the result is not representative of all Spanish households or all Spanish property sales.
1. Asking prices
Monthly municipal prices come from Idealista’s historical asking-price reports. The quarterly value is the arithmetic mean of the three monthly observations, rounded to two decimals as in the workbook. Multiplying this by 80 produces a standardised reference price, not a valuation of an actual property or a survey restricted to 80 m² listings. These are asking prices, not completed transactions.
2. Estimated income: municipal level, national time profile
The starting level is 2023 mean annual net household income from the INE Household Income Distribution Atlas (ADRH). Every quarterly municipal income value is a Hipotecalc estimate, including those for 2023. The INE does not publish the municipal quarterly income series shown here.
For the annual update, the national Living Conditions Survey (ECV) household income factor is 38,994 / 36,996: approximately +5.40%. These are income years 2024 and 2023, reported in the 2025 and 2024 surveys respectively. The factor is applied from 2024, not to the 2023 anchor.
The quarterly profile divides seasonally adjusted gross disposable income from CTNFSI by the average number of households from ECP. It is normalised by its four-quarter mean for 2023 for the 2023 observations, and by its 2024 mean for all observations from 2024 onwards. Gross national accounts income is only a temporal proxy: it is not substituted for the municipal net income level, and its statistical concept differs from ADRH/ECV.
Estimated income = municipal ADRH 2023 × ECV factor (from 2024) × quarterly national profile
The supplied factor is stored to eight decimal places. Annual household income is then calculated without intermediate cent rounding; index values and changes retain full precision until display. Income in the table is an annual amount estimated for that quarter, not income earned in just three months. All municipalities receive the same time factor. This cannot detect different local income growth and does not alter within-quarter rankings compared with the fixed-2023-income ratio.
See every quarterly income factor
| Quarter | ECV factor | Profile | Total factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023Q1 | 1.00000000 | 0.96840456 | 0.96840456 |
| 2023Q2 | 1.00000000 | 0.98893449 | 0.98893449 |
| 2023Q3 | 1.00000000 | 1.01965924 | 1.01965924 |
| 2023Q4 | 1.00000000 | 1.02300170 | 1.02300170 |
| 2024Q1 | 1.05400584 | 0.98846088 | 1.04184354 |
| 2024Q2 | 1.05400584 | 0.98986889 | 1.04332759 |
| 2024Q3 | 1.05400584 | 1.00427000 | 1.05850645 |
| 2024Q4 | 1.05400584 | 1.01740022 | 1.07234578 |
| 2025Q1 | 1.05400584 | 1.03044217 | 1.08609206 |
| 2025Q2 | 1.05400584 | 1.03270804 | 1.08848031 |
| 2025Q3 | 1.05400584 | 1.04164906 | 1.09790419 |
| 2025Q4 | 1.05400584 | 1.05887908 | 1.11606473 |
| 2026Q1 | 1.05400584 | 1.06668546 | 1.12429271 |
3. Historical validation and uncertainty
The workbook tests annual income growth in 2023 against 2022 for the same 100 municipalities. The national ECV proxy had a mean absolute error of 1.43 percentage points, versus 2.96 for the regional proxy, and a lower error in 86 municipalities. This is one annual interval used to select the proxy, not an independent out-of-sample validation of the whole quarterly model. It does not provide a confidence interval, validate the quarterly profile or guarantee future accuracy.
4. Cutoff dates, gaps and historical reports
This edition uses the workbook extracted on 7 September 2026. The last quarter with complete prices and estimated income is 2026Q1. 2026Q2 has complete prices but no income factor; 2026Q3 only has July–August prices, except Santiago de Compostela with July only. Neither quarter has an index, rank or index change. Missing values never become zero and partial quarters are excluded from comparisons.
The historical reports are retrospective reconstructions published now using this data vintage, not reports that were available in 2023, 2024 or 2025. They use later-released information and are not suitable for a real-time investment backtest. The current snapshot uses revised source series; its extraction date, publication date and observed period are different fields.
5. Interpretation and reuse
The index excludes taxes, purchase costs, down payment, interest, loan term and living costs. It describes a standardised ratio for a municipality, not the circumstances of a particular buyer. An increase is not evidence that a particular policy caused housing conditions to worsen. Medians, ranks and changes are descriptive, not forecasts.
Downloads contain derived Hipotecalc index results and attribution. They do not redistribute the full underlying Idealista monthly database. No open licence is granted over third-party data. Please retain the source, edition and estimated-income caveat when quoting a result or chart. Permission for broader redistribution must be checked with the source owner.
6. Maintenance and corrections
New income and price releases must be checked before a new quarterly edition is added. A new INE municipal income anchor requires a methodology version change and a documented historical reconstruction; it must not be spliced silently into this series. Each report is linked to a versioned snapshot. Corrections require a visible note, a new version and a new modification date while retaining the earlier download.