Italy real estate market data 2025: what the official numbers say
Quick answer: Italy recorded 766,757 residential sales in 2025, up 6.4% on 2024, with turnover above EUR 124 billion. Growth reached every macro-area of the country, financing expanded sharply, and the market’s centre of gravity kept shifting away from the largest cities toward the communes around them.
This page reports the Agenzia delle Entrate figures rather than portal estimates, because the two measure different things and are routinely confused. The tax authority counts notarised sales and the values written into deeds. Property portals publish what sellers ask. Both are useful, neither substitutes for the other, and a buyer who models an offer on the wrong one starts from a number that was never a price anybody paid.
How many homes actually changed hands in 2025?
Italy registered 766,757 residential transactions in 2025. The comparison that matters is with 719,578 in 2024, itself a year of only 1.3% growth: the market added roughly 46,000 sales in twelve months and moved decisively out of the flat period that followed the rate rises.
Turnover grew faster than volume. Sales generated more than EUR 124 billion, an increase of 8.8% and about EUR 10 billion in absolute terms. When receipts outpace transactions by more than two percentage points, the average deal has become larger, through some combination of higher values and a shift toward bigger or better-located homes. It does not, on its own, prove that any individual property appreciated.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential sales (NTN) | 719,578 | 766,757 | +6.4% |
| Turnover | about EUR 114bn | above EUR 124bn | +8.8% |
| Purchases with a mortgage | about 282,000 | about 334,000 | +52,000 |
| Mortgage capital disbursed | about EUR 38bn | EUR 47.2bn | +25% |
One point of vocabulary decides how the headline number reads. NTN is a normalised count: a flat sold with two owners each holding half counts once, not twice. It is the reason official volumes look lower than the count of contracts signed, and the reason they can be compared year to year without adjusting for how ownership happened to be split.
Where in Italy did the growth land?
Every macro-area grew, which had not been true in the preceding years, but the spread between them was wide enough to matter for anyone choosing a region.
| Macro-area | Transaction growth 2025 |
|---|---|
| North west | +8.0% |
| Centre | +7.0% |
| Islands | +6.8% |
| North east | +6.4% |
| South | +2.5% |
The south grew at less than a third of the north west’s pace. That gap is the single most useful line in the dataset for allocation, because it runs opposite to the yield tables that circulate about southern Italy. High gross yields in Bari or Palermo coexist with a market that is adding liquidity slowly, and liquidity is what determines whether an exit happens at a price or at a discount.
Turnover concentrates harder than volume does. More than half of national receipts came from the north, 23.3% from the centre, and 18.7% from the south and islands combined. The south therefore accounts for a considerably larger share of homes sold than of money spent, which is a plain statement about ticket size rather than a judgement about quality.
Did the big cities lead or lag?
They lagged, and this is the finding most likely to contradict what a buyer has been told.
The eight largest cities, Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, Genoa, Palermo, Bologna and Florence, recorded 113,794 sales between them, growth of 5.4%. The country as a whole grew 6.4%. Capoluogo communes grew 5.4% while the non-capoluogo communes around them grew about 7%. Buyers moved outward, toward smaller towns, and they did so consistently enough to show up in national statistics.
Within the eight, the ranking is not the familiar one:
| City | 2025 transaction growth |
|---|---|
| Palermo | +9.4% |
| Turin | +6.8% |
| Rome | +6.2% |
| Florence | -3.8% |
Rome alone accounted for roughly 33,000 sales, about a third of the eight-city market. Florence was the only one of the eight to contract. Milan did not lead on growth but carried the highest average transaction value of the group at about EUR 440,000, which is the more accurate way to describe Milan’s position: not the fastest-moving market in Italy, the most expensive one.
Eight-city turnover reached EUR 31.3 billion, up 9.2%, close to a quarter of the national total from eight municipalities.
What did buyers pay per square metre?
Here the two measurement systems have to be kept apart, and most published Italian price data fails to do it.
Asking prices, as indexed by the major portals, put the national average at EUR 2,188 per square metre in April 2026, up 4.24% over twelve months. For the comune of Milan the same basis reads EUR 5,653 per square metre. For the province of Milan it reads EUR 4,148, up 5.63% from EUR 3,927.
That last pair is not a contradiction and should not be reconciled. A flat inside the city walls and a house in the provincial hinterland are different goods in different markets, and the roughly EUR 1,500 per square metre between them is real. Quoting the province average for a Brera apartment understates it by a third. Quoting the city average for a house in the provincia overstates it by about the same. Both errors appear regularly in buyer research, and both produce offers that get rejected or overpaid.
Neither figure is a transacted price. Deeds record lower values than asking pages for the ordinary reason that Italian sellers expect to negotiate. Treat the asking index as the ceiling of a negotiating range and the OMI turnover data as evidence about where deals actually settle.
| Basis | Reading | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| National asking, April 2026 | EUR 2,188/sqm | What sellers list at, nationally |
| Comune di Milano asking | EUR 5,653/sqm | The city itself |
| Provincia di Milano asking | EUR 4,148/sqm | The hinterland, a separate market |
| Milan average sale value | about EUR 440,000 | Whole transactions, not per sqm |
How were purchases financed?
Financing, not cash, drove the 2025 recovery, and the size of the shift is easy to understand.
About 334,000 purchases were completed with a mortgage, roughly 52,000 more than in 2024. Mortgage-backed purchases represented 45.9% of all acquisitions by individuals. Banks disbursed EUR 47.2 billion, an increase of about 25%, some EUR 9 billion more than the previous year.
The terms behind those totals explain the behaviour:
- Average amount borrowed: about EUR 141,000, roughly EUR 7,400 more than in 2024
- Average rate: 3.35%, down about a quarter of a point
- Average term: 25.6 years
- Average monthly instalment: about EUR 660
A quarter-point of rate relief is modest. It nonetheless coincided with a 25% jump in lending, which suggests the constraint through 2024 was as much expectation as arithmetic: buyers who had postponed moved once the direction of rates was settled rather than waiting for a particular level.
For a non-resident buyer, none of these averages apply directly. Italian banks lend to non-residents on materially tighter terms, typically at lower loan-to-value and with more documentation, and the national average instalment describes a resident borrower with an Italian income. What a non-resident can expect to be offered is set out in non-resident mortgages in Italy. Read this section as market context, not as a quotation.
What does the affordability index show?
The housing accessibility index stood at 12.6% in 2025, against 12.7% in 2024. The measure expresses the share of income a representative household commits to service a mortgage on a representative home, so a lower reading means housing is marginally easier to carry.
The movement is small, and the reason it barely moved while lending grew 25% is that the components pulled in opposite directions: cheaper credit made instalments lighter, larger loans made them heavier, and the two roughly cancelled. Affordability did not improve in 2025 so much as it stopped deteriorating.
What happened in the rental market?
More than one million new rental contracts were registered, an increase of 1.5%, representing an annual market value approaching EUR 7 billion.
The composition changed more than the total. Contracts at free-market rents with terms of three years or longer fell 2.4%, while contracts at the canone concordato agreed rate rose 6%. Landlords moved toward the regulated rate, which is a rational response to its tax treatment rather than a sign of softening demand, since the agreed rate carries a reduced cedolare secca and municipal relief that can outweigh the lower headline rent.
Bare ownership sales, nuda proprietà, made up 3.2% of transactions and continued to decline as a share. That structure, where a seller retains lifetime use and the buyer waits, tends to shrink when ordinary financing is available, which is consistent with everything else in the 2025 data.
Where do foreign buyers fit?
Foreign buyers account for about 5.1% of Italian residential transactions.
That figure is smaller than most marketing material implies, and reading it as weakness would be a mistake, because national shares average across a country where foreign demand is highly concentrated. International buyers cluster in Tuscany, the lakes, Puglia, Liguria and Sicily, and within those regions in a limited set of communes. In such a comune the foreign share of the local market can be a multiple of the national figure, which is why a 5.1% national number and an agent’s claim that half their buyers are foreign can both be true.
The practical consequence is about exit rather than entry. In a market where foreign demand is the marginal buyer, resale liquidity depends on conditions in other countries: currency, travel, and the tax treatment of second homes abroad. That is a different risk profile from a property whose buyers are local, and it deserves to be priced.
What this dataset does not tell you
Being explicit about the limits is more useful than extending the tables.
The official statistics report volumes, turnover and financing. They do not publish a national average price per square metre for transacted homes, which is why the per-square-metre figures on this page come from asking-price indices and are labelled as such. Anyone presenting a single transacted price per square metre for Italy is combining sources that were not built to be combined.
Regional and city growth rates describe whole municipal markets. A comune contains districts moving in opposite directions, and Rome is the clearest case: growth of 6.2% across the city says nothing about whether a specific quartiere rose or fell. Before an offer, the relevant comparison is the OMI quartiere table for that zone and recent closed sales in the same building type, not a city average.
Finally, this is 2025 data published in mid-2026. It describes a year that has ended. It is a reliable account of where the market has been and a weak basis for predicting the next twelve months, particularly on rates, where the whole 2025 recovery turned on a shift of about a quarter of a point.
How to check a single address against these numbers
National and city figures are the wrong instrument for pricing one property, so the sequence below moves from this page to the address.
Start with the OMI quartiere tables, which the Agenzia delle Entrate publishes twice a year at zone level rather than city level. They give a range per square metre for each building type in each zone, separating ordinary from restored stock. A Rome flat sits in a named zone with its own band, and that band, not the 6.2% city growth rate, is what an offer should be argued against.
Then establish what the building actually is on paper. The visura catastale gives the category and the cadastral rent, and the planimetria gives the registered layout. Where the layout on file and the layout on viewing differ, the gap is an unpermitted work that has to be regularised before a sale completes, and it belongs in the price rather than in a list of things to sort out later.
Ask the agent for closed comparables in the same building or the immediately adjacent streets, with dates. Asking prices from a portal are the weakest evidence available at this stage, because they are the one number in the process that no buyer has agreed to.
Finally, apply the transaction costs before comparing anything to a yield. A gross yield calculated on an asking price and an optimistic rent, with no closing stack and no vacancy, is not a return; it is a listing.
Where to read next
- Buy property in Italy as a foreigner: the acquisition sequence, codice fiscale, and power of attorney if you are not present at the deed.
- Cost of buying property in Italy: the closing stack that sits on top of every price on this page.
- Best regions to invest in Italy property in 2026: how the macro-area growth spread above translates into region choice.
- Is Italy property a good investment in 2026: what this cycle data does and does not support as a forward view.
Sources: Agenzia delle Entrate, Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare, Rapporto Immobiliare 2026 sul settore residenziale, published 21 May 2026 in collaboration with ABI; Rapporto Immobiliare 2025 for the 2024 comparison; Immobiliare.it asking-price indices, April 2026 readings.
Frequently Asked Questions
766,757, on the normalised transaction count published by the Agenzia delle Entrate. That is 6.4% above the 719,578 recorded in 2024, and it makes 2025 the strongest year of the current cycle.
Turnover rose faster than volume, 8.8% against 6.4%, which means the average sale was larger. Asking prices tracked separately: the national average stood at EUR 2,188 per square metre in April 2026, up 4.24% year on year.
About 334,000 purchases were financed, roughly 52,000 more than in 2024, and 45.9% of all purchases made by individuals. Banks disbursed EUR 47.2 billion, a quarter more than the year before.
Palermo at 9.4% and Turin at 6.8% led the eight largest cities. Rome grew 6.2% on roughly 33,000 sales. Florence was the only one of the eight to contract, at -3.8%.
About 5.1% of residential transactions. Foreign demand is concentrated rather than spread: it clusters in Tuscany, the lakes, Puglia, Liguria and Sicily, so a national share understates its weight in those specific markets.
Both, for different places. EUR 5,653 is the comune of Milan and EUR 4,148 is the province. Quoting the province figure for a city flat, or the city figure for a hinterland one, is the most common way to misprice a Milanese purchase.
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