Map: How much you need to earn to live in every London postcode
Londonders are obsessed with how much it costs them just to have somewhere to kip at the end of the day.
Understandably so. Rents are rising faster in the capital than anywhere in the country, while wages for full-time workers have been creeping up at a painfully slow rate.
Yesterday, Sadiq Khan caused ripples when he claimed it is cheaper to own your own private island than a tiny corner of the capital. Assuming you aren’t yet ready for a life of isolation somewhere in the Pacific, you’re stuck with London. And new research out this morning has shown that the squeeze on living standards for the capital’s renters is as tight as ever.
This map, from Totallymoney.com, shows how much a full-time worker needs to be earning to afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in every London postcode (scroll down for a close-up of each area):
Top of the pile, unsurprisingly, is prime City real estate – EC3 – where you’ll need to be taking home £49.19 an hour – or £162,000 a year – if you want a one-bed pad overlooking the Tower of London.
At the bottom of the list is Zone 4 Abbey Wood (SE2) – the only place with a London postcode where renters can afford to live alone on a wage of less than £10 an hour.
With a required hourly take of £8.21, that means low-paid workers are pretty much priced out of the capital.
The graphics below show how much an individual must earn each hour, based on working 37.5 paid hours a week, in order to cover the cost of a one-bed rental in each of the postcode areas, without spending more than half their income on rent.
