How much UK house prices have really risen

In the 1950s just under 400 hours work would have bought you the average home – with prices less than a quarter average earnings at £2,000. That’s about the same as what 90 ounces of gold would have cost then.

By the 1960s you would have needed to work an extra 240 hours on the average wage to buy the average home, but you would have needed almost twice as much gold at about 174 ounces. However, at £4,000 the average house was still less than the average salary.

In the 1970s you would need far less gold to buy the average home, after the price collapsed. Just 54 ounces would have bought you the average house. But you’d have to work almost twice as long at the average wage to earn enough money to buy a home as you would have 10 years earlier.

By the 1980s the house price boom had taken off in earnest, with the average house price trebling while incomes rose a modest 17%. That meant for the first time the average home became higher than the average income – in fact twice as high. House prices also rose far faster than gold prices, meaning n the 1980s you would have needed 175 ounces of gold to but an average home.

House prices continued to rocket upwards in the 1990s, with the average home costing more than three times the average salary and the equivalent of 313 ounces of gold – a huge increase but still less than a standard gold bar.

Prices rocketed even further away from earnings in the 2000s - an average house now taking more than seven years’ average earnings to pay for. Great news if you had one already, terrible if you didn’t. As well as running away from earnings, you would also need a lot more gold, 562.82 ounces of the stuff, to buy a home.

Of course, by the end of the 2000s recession struck and a 20-year boom in house prices stopped in its tracks. Sadly, wages were also hit, meaning it now takes more than eight-and-a-half years to earn enough money to buy an average house at average wages. But something else happened too, the gold price rocketed. In fact, at the end of 2011 you would need less gold to buy a home than you would have in the 1960s at 151.53 ounces.

And here’s all the figures in one handy chart. Thanks to Savills for creating the graphics to accompany this. Earnings and house price data comes from the Office for National Statistics and is based on national averages for the period mentioned.