Here are the specific numbers. In the twelve months to January 2026, residential property prices in Ireland rose by 7%, according to the CSO's Residential Property Price Index — an acceleration from the 6.9% recorded to December 2025. House prices in Dublin rose 6.1%; outside the capital they rose 7.7%. The median sale price nationally now stands around €385,000. In Dublin it is €475,000. In Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, the most expensive county in the country, the median is €680,000. In Blackrock, the most expensive single postcode, the median price paid was €840,000.
On the rental side: nationwide rents climbed 4.4% in 2025, accelerating from 3.6% in 2024. The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment reached €2,086 nationally during Q4 2025. In Dublin, the average two-bed hit €2,438 — with city-centre properties approaching €2,700 in certain areas. On 1 February 2026 — just before new national rent controls took effect — fewer than 1,800 homes were listed for rent across the entire country. A 22% drop from the same date in 2025. The lowest February figure ever recorded by Daft.ie.
Rents have now risen in 13 of the past 14 years. They stand 34% above pre-Covid levels and nearly 80% higher than a decade ago.
What the Supply Numbers Actually Mean
The standard response to Ireland's housing problem is supply. Build more. The response is correct and insufficient simultaneously, which is the specific kind of policy failure that is hardest to communicate because it is defensible in the abstract and inadequate in practice.
Ireland's population grew by 78,300 people in 2025 alone, reaching 5.46 million. The Bank of Ireland expects completions to remain elevated in 2026. The SCSI's market monitor forecasts average national price growth of 4% this year — a moderation from 2025, but still positive. Construction is happening. It is not happening at anything close to the pace the demand requires.
Analysts estimate that construction would need to roughly double across private, rental, and social housing segments to restore long-term equilibrium. The structural obstacle is not political will, exactly — every party is on record supporting more housing — but the compounding of planning delays, land hoarding, skills shortages in construction trades, and financing challenges for social and affordable housing providers that has characterised the sector for a decade and shows no sign of resolving quickly.
Outside Dublin, the picture is in some ways worse. The Midlands region — Laois, Longford, Offaly, Westmeath — recorded the strongest house price growth nationally at approximately 15% over the past year, driven by buyers priced out of Dublin seeking value in areas with improving transport links. Galway apartment prices rose 11.4% in Q4 2025 alone. Limerick saw over 10% annual rent growth in 2025 despite being one of Ireland's more affordable cities by historical comparison.
Nearly 42,300 rental properties owned by private investors left the Irish market between 2020 and early 2025. That is not a policy failure that occurred overnight. It is the accumulated consequence of a decade of regulatory and tax friction for small landlords, combined with rising costs and rising capital values that made selling more attractive than continuing to let. The supply crisis in the rental market is not simply a construction problem. It is a landlord exit problem that new builds cannot easily replace in the short term.
The Cost-Rental Model and Its Structural Problem
Cost-rental — the model in which housing associations, the Land Development Agency, or local authorities provide homes at rents below market rate to eligible tenants — was presented as one of the central policy responses to the affordability crisis. In principle, it is sound: residents pay no more than 35% of net income, tenancies have no duration limit, the landlord is a regulated non-profit entity. The first cost-rental development at Balbriggan in 2021 received more than 1,000 applications for 25 homes. The LDA's Shanganagh Castle development in December 2024 received more than 4,600 applications for 195 apartments.
But the model is showing structural cracks that The Irish Times reported in detail in April 2026. The initial projects were able to price rents considerably below market rates — in Balbriggan, almost half the local rent for new homes. More recent schemes cannot achieve this. At Montpelier in Dublin 7, Tuath Housing is offering two-bedroom apartments at €1,695 per month — still 25% below market for comparable new builds, but reaching the upper limit of what a household earning up to the €66,000 income cap can afford without exceeding 35% of take-home pay.
Meanwhile, Clúid Housing was forced to abandon cost-rental plans at Bannow Road in Cabra, not because of construction costs but because of long-term maintenance financing. The economics of cost-rental, which looked viable at a lower construction cost base and a lower interest rate environment, are strained by the current cost of building and the cost of borrowing.
The political framing of cost-rental as a solution to the housing crisis conflated the model's genuine merits with an implied scale that was never achievable. The system is not broken — it provides genuinely good outcomes for the tenants who access it. What is broken is the gap between what cost-rental can deliver at realistic scale and what the level of housing need actually requires.
New Rent Controls: What Changed in March 2026
The new nationwide rent control framework that took effect on 1 March 2026 replaced the localised Rent Pressure Zone system with a national cap on annual rent increases of 2% or the lower CPI inflation rate, whichever is smaller. For existing tenants, this provides some protection against the acceleration seen in recent years.
The limitation is that the new controls do not apply retroactively to existing leases, and — crucially — they allow market resets between tenancies. When a tenant leaves a property, the landlord can set the new rent at market rate before the cap applies again. This means the 2% cap protects sitting tenants but does not prevent the structural upward drift of market rents when landlord turnover drives vacancy into the open market.
Professor Ronan Lyons of Trinity College Dublin, whose Daft.ie rental reports are the most closely followed independent analysis of the Irish market, attributed the supply drop in early 2026 partly to "widespread uncertainty" among landlords ahead of the new national rent control framework. Landlords anticipating tighter restrictions accelerated sale decisions before the March 2026 implementation. The policy response to rental inflation contributed, at least in part, to an acceleration of the supply contraction it was designed to address.
The Gap Between the Story and the Numbers
Ireland is not a country in housing freefall. Construction is at relatively high levels by recent historical standards. Some urban indicators are showing signs of supply-side improvement. The macro picture has brighter elements than the acute crisis framing sometimes allows.
But the numbers that define the experience of actually trying to find somewhere to live in Ireland in 2026 are not ambiguous. Fewer than 1,800 homes available to rent nationwide. A 7% annual price rise in a market where median Dublin prices are approaching half a million euro. A cost-rental model working exactly as designed for the small fraction of people who can access it. A rental sector contracting faster than new supply can replace it.
The homeownership rate in Ireland has fallen from nearly 70% in 2011 to around 66% in the most recent Census. In Dublin City, more than 45% of households now rent. A generation of Irish people are renting indefinitely in a market that is structured to make that expensive, insecure, and unlikely to improve significantly in the near term.
The story being told about Irish housing and the numbers being produced by Irish housing are not yet in the same place. The gap between them is where the policy failure lives.