Housing in Poland and the US: the data
· This piece is also available in Polish
Part one · Poland and the United States, 2024 data
How much space a paycheck buys
You put aside a third of what you earn every month. You take out a thirty-year mortgage. This is how many square feet you get.The inspiration and point of reference is the work of Franziska Sielker and Selim Banabak, “Where can you still afford to live?” (Journal of Maps, 2026). We calculate the measure ourselves for Poland and the US, because the authors don’t share their data. One third of average equivalized disposable income goes to a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage payment, and the amount you can borrow that way is converted into floor space at the local price. No down payment, no taxes or fees, the same on both sides.
The drawings are to the same scale: the difference between one square and another reflects the actual difference in floor space. The numbers are the middle of the pack, meaning half of the residents live in counties where it comes out worse, half where it comes out better (each county at its own average income).
Scale first
What 500 square feet looks like
In Poland, 540 square feet (50 square meters) is a two-room apartment with a kitchen. In the US that size barely exists: the typical home sold in 2024 had about 1,700 sq ft. The average apartment that actually changed hands in Poland had 570 sq ft.
The mortgage itself
What borrowing the money costs
A Polish mortgage is more expensive. In 2024 banks in Poland lent for housing at an average of 7.66 percent, American banks at 6.72.Poland: European Central Bank, 2024 average for new zloty-denominated housing loans. US: Freddie Mac, 2024 average for a 30-year mortgage. Over thirty years you pay back 2.56 times what you borrowed in Poland, and 2.33 times in the US.
But that doesn’t explain the gap. If Polish banks lent at the American rate, with the same prices and paychecks, you’d get 420 sq ft instead of 380. That’s 40 of the 830 square feet that separate us. Home prices and pay do the rest.
On neither side do we count fees, insurance, the Polish transaction tax and notary fees, or American closing costs. We also leave out running costs: the annual property tax in the US (typically about 1.1 percent of the home’s value), and in Poland the monthly building maintenance fee and renovation fund. The American property tax alone would cut that result from 1,210 to 1,040 sq ft. Polish maintenance fees can’t be calculated from public data by county, so we don’t make that correction on either side.
Poland, 379 counties
Where it’s hardest in Poland
The worst places are the ones where prices are set by outsiders. Tatra County:“County” here and throughout translates the Polish powiat, the administrative level roughly equivalent to a US county. Poland has about 380 of them. 130 sq ft. Kamień County, meaning Międzyzdroje and around: 160. Sopot: 170.Tatra County is the district around Zakopane, Poland’s best-known resort in the Tatra Mountains. Kamień County lies on the Baltic coast and includes the seaside resort of Międzyzdroje. Sopot is a small, upscale seaside resort between Gdańsk and Gdynia. These aren’t places where people earn a lot. They’re places where other people buy, and local paychecks can’t keep up.Prices: median transaction price per square meter from Statistics Poland (GUS, Local Data Bank) by county, broken down by apartment size, since small apartments cost more per square meter. Income: PLN 67,120 a year (about $16,900) from EU-SILC 2025 (2024 income), distributed across counties using the dataset by Mikou et al. (2024), the same one the study’s authors used. Prices in dollars use the 2024 average exchange rate of 3.98 zloty per dollar. Boundaries: Eurostat GISCO.
Big cities come right after them. Kraków ranks 6th from the bottom (220 sq ft), Wrocław 10th (250). Warsaw only 25th (290), because that’s where pay keeps up with prices the most.Warsaw is Poland’s capital and largest city; Kraków and Wrocław are among the next largest, both major university and tourist cities. In the counties where 78 percent of Poles live, a third of a paycheck won’t cover a mortgage on even 500 square feet.
The map on the left shows Poland on the scale we’re about to use for America. Almost the whole country falls into a single class, so you can’t read anything inside Poland from it. That’s why the one next to it has thresholds fitted to the Polish spread. On both, darker means less space.
United States, 13,797 ZIP codes
America on the same scale
Gray areas are places without reliable data, mostly ones where homes hardly ever sell.Prices: median sale price per square foot from Redfin by county. ZIP codes use Realtor.com listing prices, adjusted by the ratio of sale price to list price in their county. Boundaries: US Census TIGER.
Which America?
California has 39 million people, about as many as Poland. A third of a paycheck buys 490 sq ft there. Next door in Texas, 1,380.Income: $58,844 a year from CPS ASEC 2025 (after federal and state taxes and payroll contributions), distributed across counties and ZIP codes using the American Community Survey (ACS 2024, five-year data). The middle of the pack for the whole US is 1,210 sq ft, and it describes neither.
Why not Silicon Valley
Contrary to what you might expect, it isn’t worst where homes are most expensive. Silicon Valley comes out at 470 sq ft, San Francisco at 490, even though a square foot costs about $980 there. Local pay largely keeps up with those prices. On Maui, homes are only a bit cheaper, but people earn ordinary money, and it comes out at 300 sq ft. Manhattan, with the most expensive square feet of any big city, gives 350.
Maui is the same mechanism that pushes Zakopane, Międzyzdroje and Sopot to the very bottom in Poland. It isn’t about big cities, but about places where prices are set by other people’s money.
No American state, though, is as hard as Poland
The closest is Hawaii: 420 sq ft, but only 1.4 million people live there. Poland has 37 million, and the middle of the pack lands at 380 sq ft.
Each bar is one hundred percent of residents, split by how much floor space a third of their pay covers. The number on the right is the result for a typical resident, in square feet. Poland is measured by county (powiat), the states by US county.
A Polish county is smaller than an American one: the typical Pole lives in a county of about 250,000 people, the typical American in a county of over a million. Smaller units show more extremes, so this comparison slightly flatters America. On ZIP codes, which are smaller than Polish counties, the middle of the pack for the US is 1,160 sq ft instead of 1,210, so the conclusion doesn’t change.
Show all numbers
| Area | Residents | Middle of the pack | <500 | 500–800 | 800–1,100 | 1,100–1,600 | 1,600+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poland (counties) | 37,408,338 | 380 sq ft | 78.1 | 20.9 | 1.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Hawaii | 1,445,168 | 420 sq ft | 100.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| California | 39,287,377 | 490 sq ft | 52.1 | 44.4 | 3.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| New York | 19,852,366 | 790 sq ft | 40.2 | 11.2 | 16.6 | 24.6 | 7.3 |
| Whole US (counties) | 333,629,852 | 1,210 sq ft | 9.1 | 9.8 | 20.6 | 47.5 | 13.0 |
| Texas | 30,113,470 | 1,380 sq ft | 0.0 | 0.2 | 7.7 | 75.8 | 16.2 |
| Ohio | 11,810,293 | 1,570 sq ft | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.3 | 61.3 | 38.3 |
| US by ZIP code | 299,972,567 | 1,160 sq ft | 8.3 | 14.1 | 22.6 | 38.9 | 16.2 |
What this number doesn’t tell you
If you know the map from the study
How this differs from Sielker and Banabak’s study on Taylor & Francis Online
The measure comes from a paper published in the Journal of Maps, which mapped it for thirty European countries. Anyone who puts their map of Poland next to ours will see two different pictures, and that’s how it should be.
Theirs is drawn on municipalities (gminy), of which there are 2,477. Ours is on counties, because Statistics Poland reports prices only for those. Hence its finer, speckled texture. Theirs leaves gray the places where they found no listings; ours fills every county. Theirs uses listing prices collected from real estate portals; ours uses prices from notarial deeds. We take income from the same source as the authors, but from a newer year of the national average.
Part two · posts online, September 2024 – September 2026
Poles have it harder when it comes to housing. Yet they complain less.
Young people in Poland and the US can’t afford a home. But when they talk about it, they talk about something different, blame someone different and want something different. This study measures not the situation, but what people write about it.
“My father bought out his co-op apartment for one zloty. He only paid the notary. And I can’t afford a mortgage on a place of my own. Some justice.”
“I lived in my car for 3 years. I don’t wish it on hard working people. I fought my way out of it.”
Even so, out of every 100 posts about housing, a complaint turns up in 2–4 Polish ones and in 7–8 American ones — and that’s in a period that still catches the tail end of the wave of anger over the mortgage subsidies.
How much complaining
We compare each platform only with itself: Polish Reddit with American Reddit, Polish X with American X, Polish TikTok with American TikTok. On every one of them Americans complain two to three and a half times as often.
Posts with a complaint per 100 posts about housing
Show numbers
| Platform | Poland: complaints per 100 posts | US: complaints per 100 posts | Posts PL / US |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.42 (3.0 to 3.8) | 6.71 (6.4 to 7.0) | 8,005 / 23,665 | |
| Reddit without topic subreddits | 3.45 (3.1 to 3.9) | 7.13 (6.7 to 7.5) | 7,950 / 15,766 |
| X | 3.60 (3.4 to 3.8) | 7.88 (7.6 to 8.1) | 39,484 / 78,029 |
| TikTok | 2.20 (1.8 to 2.6) | 7.62 (7.2 to 8.1) | 4,951 / 12,527 |
The black line on each bar is the margin of error. Each platform has its own scale, because people write differently on each — compare the bars within one chart. The result holds when we account for the fact that our way of detecting complaints sometimes gets it wrong (we checked 80 random hits in each language), and when we drop real estate forums from Reddit.
What people complain about
An American who complains most often simply says: I can’t afford it. A Pole more often says that something is wrong with the whole system: developers build shoeboxes and cut corners, the state subsidizes the wrong things, investors buy up apartments. Price alone is less than a third of complaints in Poland.
Poland — 60 complaints
US — 58 complaints
One square is one complaint we read. We read two separate, randomly drawn batches of 40 posts about housing from each country — ones our detection method flagged as complaints. The result repeats in both batches. In Poland the first had 11 complaints about price and 21 about “the system”, the second 6 about price and 22 about “the system”. In the US the first had 25 complaints about price and 1 about something else, the second 25 about price and 7 about something else. Posts that turned out not to be complaints at all were left out (Poland 20, US 22 of 80).
Who’s to blame
In Poland the culprit is the same on every platform: developers, banks and the state. Out of every 100 mentions of blame, that trio collects 61 to 77. In the US the culprit depends on the platform: on Reddit and TikTok it’s most often the landlord, on X and in tech discussions it’s government and regulations. The same trio gets 23 to 50 per 100 in the US.
Contrary to the popular story about investment funds “buying up America”, funds get only 2–4 of every 100 mentions of blame in the US — about as much as in Poland.
A note on immigrants: they come up in both countries, but not in the same way. In 40 randomly chosen Polish posts about immigrants, 17 blame them for prices and 2 reject that blame. In the American ones, 14 blame them and as many as 12 reject it (“It ain’t illegal immigrants who are driving up your housing prices. It’s Wall Street and predatory corporations like Zillow that are!” — a Reddit comment, July 7, 2026). The raw number of mentions would overstate American hostility.
What to do about it
Here the two sides aren’t proposing different versions of the same idea, but ideas that come from a completely different diagnosis. Americans say: build more, because there aren’t enough homes and regulations block construction. Poles say: tax the people who own several apartments, and let the state build, because investors are buying up the housing. In the Polish diagnosis, “build more” doesn’t help — the new apartments would be bought by the same people.
Poland wants to tax those who have too much. America wants to be allowed to build more — and if not, to cap rents.
“Rent control” in Polish is often an argument over the slogan “housing is a right, not a commodity”: in 40 random posts only 10 are support, 14 are mockery, and 11 accuse politicians of hypocrisy. In English, support prevails (15 to 9).
A home or kids
One thing is clearly Polish. When a Pole writes about what they do in the face of expensive housing, they very often answer: they give up on having kids or put it off. On Polish Reddit that’s about one in 6 such statements, on American Reddit one in 19.
Out of every 100 mentions of what people do about expensive housing — how many are about kids (one figure = 5 per 100)
X
TikTok
Show numbers
| Platform | Poland: per 100 | US: per 100 |
|---|---|---|
| 17.7 | 5.2 | |
| X | 13.7 | 1.7 |
| TikTok | 12.1 | 3.9 |
Where homes come from
Reading the top-rated Polish posts, it’s hard not to notice where people got a roof over their heads: an allocation in the PRL, a flat from the workplace, a municipal apartment bought out for a fraction of its value, grandma’s place.PRL is the abbreviation for the Polish People’s Republic, the communist state of 1945–1989, when apartments were allocated rather than bought. In Poland you get a home. In the US, you buy it or lose it: in English there’s far more talk about eviction, the bank taking the house, and homelessness.
Out of every 100 mentions of where homes come from and what takes them away
Show numbers
| Topic | Reddit PL | Reddit US | X PL | X US | TikTok PL | TikTok US |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| inheritance | 25.2 | 4.8 | 8.3 | 4.1 | 16.3 | 5.0 |
| help from parents | 10.7 | 3.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 9.2 | 5.0 |
| deposit, down payment | 51.5 | 29.2 | 81.6 | 19.1 | 58.0 | 45.7 |
| eviction, losing a home | 9.9 | 60.8 | 5.3 | 73.0 | 11.0 | 42.0 |
| the old way in | 2.7 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 1.4 | 5.5 | 2.3 |
Still, how often people talk about something doesn’t tell you how often it happens. The real scale of inheritance or family help is of a similar order in both countries: in Poland 26% of homes came as a gift or inheritance (2016 data), in the US 22–25% of first-time buyers get money from family for the down payment (2024 data).Poland: National Bank of Poland and Statistics Poland, Household Wealth Survey 2016 — the current home came as a gift (about 15%) or an inheritance (about 11%). US: NAR, Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers 2024 — first-time buyers who got money from family for the down payment (two NAR reports give 22 and 25%). These measures aren’t directly comparable: the Polish one says where the home someone lives in came from, the American one where the down payment came from for a specific purchase, and they are eight years apart. The gap in how often inheritance is mentioned (2.0–5.2× more on the Polish side) is therefore mostly an artifact of how much a society talks about it, not of how often it happens. Americans stay quiet about family help more often than they go without it.
Even eviction means something different. In 40 random Polish posts about eviction, half speak in the tenant’s voice and half in the landlord’s (“if you don’t pay for 2–3 months, it’s eviction with a police escort”: 9 to 9). In English the tenant’s voice clearly prevails (20 to 5).
Poles aren’t passive. They act differently
People in both countries write about taking action — reporting, fundraising, raising awareness — equally rarely: about 6 in 1,000 posts about housing on Reddit (0.60 vs 0.54 per 100). But it’s an entirely different kind of action. Poles fight for price transparency and build their own tools: they chipped in to buy data from the government register of transaction prices and published it on Deweloperuch.pl before the state did.RCN is Poland’s official register of real estate transaction prices. Access to its data was paid and cumbersome; Deweloperuch.pl is a grassroots site that crowdfunded the purchase of the data and published it. Americans go to an agency or to court: complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, class actions against RealPage, a company that helped landlords coordinate rents, tenant courts.
Reddit: out of every 100 mentions of civic action
“Folks from the holy #nieruchomosci tag, #deweloperuch has released the RCN data from our fundraiser. Upvote it :)”
Most of this activity is on Wykop, a Polish link-sharing and discussion site similar to Reddit: 2.6–2.7 per 100 posts about housing, four times as much as on Polish Reddit. On TikTok people in both countries write about action equally rarely (0.16 vs 0.14 per 100). We left X out, because some of the Polish search terms were about price transparency.
Why then
The Polish wave of anger peaked in the summer of 2024, just before our window starts — so most of the posts we collected catch its tail end. What set it off? If the cause was a specific government program, people should be naming it. And they do. Among the most popular Wykop posts about housing, the name of the mortgage subsidy program — first “Safe 2% Mortgage”, then the announced “0% mortgage” and “A Start” — appears from mid-2023 in one in three, and at the peak in almost one in two (48%).“Bezpieczny kredyt 2%” (Safe 2% Mortgage) was a Polish government program launched in mid-2023 that subsidized mortgage rates down to 2% for first-time buyers. It was followed by announcements of a “0% mortgage” and a program called “Na start” (A Start).
Show numbers
| Quarter | Housing /1,000 | Naming the program /1,000 | Program named among housing posts | Doctors /1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-Q1 | 6.4 | 0.0 | 0% | 9.5 |
| 2022-Q2 | 12.0 | 0.2 | 1% | 5.9 |
| 2022-Q3 | 10.6 | 0.0 | 0% | 6.6 |
| 2022-Q4 | 9.2 | 0.4 | 3% | 11.1 |
| 2023-Q1 | 9.4 | 0.8 | 3% | 13.0 |
| 2023-Q2 | 8.9 | 1.5 | 10% | 12.6 |
| 2023-Q3 | 10.1 | 4.3 | 37% | 13.7 |
| 2023-Q4 | 10.3 | 4.5 | 38% | 12.1 |
| 2024-Q1 | 24.2 | 10.9 | 38% | 10.9 |
| 2024-Q2 | 43.1 | 23.9 | 46% | 11.6 |
| 2024-Q3 | 49.6 | 28.2 | 48% | 12.7 |
| 2024-Q4 | 41.3 | 12.1 | 25% | 12.9 |
| 2025-Q1 | 39.1 | 12.6 | 26% | 13.4 |
| 2025-Q2 | 32.3 | 5.0 | 12% | 14.6 |
| 2025-Q3 | 27.6 | 1.1 | 4% | 13.5 |
| 2025-Q4 | 15.9 | 0.2 | 1% | 26.3 |
| 2026-Q1 | 15.4 | 0.7 | 5% | 25.9 |
| 2026-Q2 | 11.1 | 0.5 | 0% | 68.6 |
| 2026-Q3 | 9.6 | 0.0 | 0% | 135.4 |
The wave died down in two steps. First the program disappeared: from summer 2024 to spring 2025 its name fell from 48% to 12% of housing posts, and there were a third fewer such posts overall. Then, from the fall of 2025, the rest faded — probably replaced by the doctors’ pay scandal, the public anger at high and often abusively calculated pay for doctors (from 13 to 69 posts per thousand).In 2026 Poland was swept by public outrage over doctors’ pay: very high and often abusively calculated earnings in the public health system. So the change of topic explains the second step, not the first. And the doctors didn’t just push housing aside — they entered the same story as “the people who own a dozen apartments”.
How Poles talk about the program
How Americans talk about similar programs
“50 year mortgage. 84 month car loans. Student loans for 20-25 years. Gotta keep the peasants working.”
In the US, similar programs show up in just 0.1–0.7 of every 100 posts about housing and set off no wave. That’s a difference between the countries, not something that happens in every conversation about housing. The program also explains whom Poles blame: in posts that name it, the developer–bank–state trio gets more blame on every Polish platform (on X 65 per 100 without the program’s name, 84 with it). Those are exactly the parties to the subsidy mechanism: the state pays, the bank lends, the developer sells for more. In the US, a mention of such a program goes together with “build instead” (on X 55 vs 33 per 100).
The topic fades, the tone sharpens
On Polish X complaints are growing: from 2.7 per 100 posts in September 2024 to 4.8 in 2026. Yet over the same period housing drops out of Wykop’s most popular posts (by 67–78%). Fewer people talk about it, but those who do talk more sharply. In the US complaints are also growing on X, while on Reddit they hold steady.
Complaints per 100 posts about housing, by quarter
Show numbers: Reddit
| Quarter | Reddit PL | Reddit US |
|---|---|---|
| 2024Q3 | 4.4 | 5.1 |
| 2024Q4 | 6.1 | 6.6 |
| 2025Q1 | 3.0 | 6.6 |
| 2025Q2 | 2.4 | 7.3 |
| 2025Q3 | 3.5 | 7.1 |
| 2025Q4 | 3.4 | 7.0 |
| 2026Q1 | 3.5 | 6.5 |
| 2026Q2 | 2.2 | 6.9 |
| 2026Q3 | 4.0 | 6.7 |
Show numbers: X
| Quarter | X PL | X US |
|---|---|---|
| 2024Q3 | 2.7 | 6.1 |
| 2024Q4 | 3.4 | 6.0 |
| 2025Q1 | 3.4 | 7.5 |
| 2025Q2 | 3.0 | 7.2 |
| 2025Q3 | 3.8 | 8.9 |
| 2025Q4 | 3.8 | 9.3 |
| 2026Q1 | 3.5 | 8.7 |
| 2026Q2 | 4.2 | 7.6 |
| 2026Q3 | 4.8 | 8.7 |
We don’t show this for TikTok: there, post dates depend on the order in which the service serves up videos, not on when people wrote. Whether some other topic was pushing housing aside in the US, as the doctors’ scandal did in Poland, we don’t know — we have no data on other topics there.
Two Americas
Spanish-language TikTok in the US region talks about housing differently from its English-language part. Its conversation about getting a home focuses more on the financial terms of buying and renting. In the English-language part, other topics take up more room, especially losing a home.
The homeowner’s and the expert’s topics disappear too: property tax, zoning, “build more”, grievances against the parents’ generation. The renter’s topics stay: rent, deposits, landlords, rent control.
| Topic | in English, per 100 | in Spanish, per 100 | mentions in Spanish |
|---|---|---|---|
| property tax on your own home | 19 | 2 | 2 |
| zoning, building rules | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| “build more” | 14 | 0 | 0 |
| grievances against boomers | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| living with parents or roommates | 24 | 2 | 1 |
| rent control | 13 | 12 | 5 |
| deposit, down payment | 46 | 75 | 86 |
| landlords | 37 | 20 | 24 |
| government, authorities | 8 | 38 | 47 |
Per 100 mentions of each kind. Faded rows are topics that nearly vanish in Spanish. There are few posts in Spanish (1,389), so this is a cautious conclusion, and 95 of them are about places in Latin America or Spain. The takeaway for the whole study: what we call “American” here is in practice English-speaking.
Every platform speaks in its own voice
None of these platforms is a sample of society. Each has its own people and its own tone, and the differences between platforms within one country can be as large as the differences between countries. That’s why you can’t read “what Poles think” or “what Americans think” off a single site. Below is a portrait of each of the twelve collections: who gets blamed there, which idea comes up most, and what gets talked about there noticeably more than elsewhere.
The bar shows how blame is distributed: the four largest categories and the rest. It’s the only measure that can be compared across sites collected by different methods. “Above the norm” — how many times more often than is typical on the other platforms in the same language; we count only topics with at least 3 per 100 mentions and 10 occurrences. The “who writes here” descriptions are our summary after reading the top-rated posts, not a user survey. For X the numbers are partly inflated by the search terms we used.
What’s certain and what isn’t
- Poles complain less, even though objectively they have it harder.
- The Polish culprit: developer, bank, state. The American one depends on the platform.
- America wants to build; Poland wants to tax owning many apartments.
- Zoning as a culprit shows up only in the US.
- Inheriting a home is talked about more in Poland, losing one in the US.
- Complaints about build quality and floor space are Polish — no wonder.
- The Polish wave was sparked by the subsidy program. It died down first when the program ended, and only then because of the doctors’ scandal.
- The Polish complaint is about the system, the American one about price (two separate samples, same result).
- Activism: in Poland price transparency and homemade tools, in the US agencies and courts — at the same frequency.
- “The US” is at least two different conversations: English and Spanish.
- The topic fades while the tone sharpens.
- Whether fewer complaints means less dissatisfaction, or just a different way of talking about it.
- Whether some other topic was pushing housing aside in the US.
How we measured it
- Material. 12 collections, 772,359 posts, of which 701,687 from September 2024 – September 2026: Wykop, Reddit, X, TikTok (in Polish, English and Spanish), Hacker News, Lemmy. We count only posts about housing, at least 40 characters long.
- Two numbers. “Per 100 posts” — how often something comes up in posts about housing; we compare this only within the same platform. “Per 100 mentions” (of blame, ideas and so on) — what share of all mentions of blame, ideas etc. a given topic collects.
- Reading first. Before counting anything, we read the 40 top-rated posts from each collection. Later we checked more than 600 random hits by hand: support, opposition, or just description. If the same topic meant something different in Polish and English, we split it.
- What we don’t compare. Emotions and swearing across languages (different habits), collections gathered in different ways, or trends from TikTok.
- Limitations. Posts online aren’t the opinion of the whole society. English-language sites are partly global: between 0.5% and 12% of posts are explicitly about places outside the US.