Housing, the first budget item for the French

Secondary for the post-war French, the household housing budget exploded to become, by far, their main item of expenditure today.

For a long time, food cost more money than housing.

It was only from 1976 that housing expenditure (17,9% of total expenditure, including water and energy) exceeded, by a small margin, that of food (17,7%), according to INSEE. This is now the big gap: in 2022, 26,7% of the French spending budget is devoted to housing, or twice as much as for food (13,5%).

Rent, loan repayments, water, gas, electricity bills... A large part of housing expenses are called "pre-committed" in the jargon of statisticians. That is to say, according to INSEE, they are engaged by “a contract that is difficult to renegotiate in the short term”.

These constrained expenses linked to housing, often automatically debited from the bank account, will swallow up 22,1% of household disposable income in 2022, compared to only 9,5% in 1960. However, changes have been limited over the past fifteen years.

26,7% of expenses, 22,1% of disposable income, the difference between these two figures is explained by a different basis of calculation, disposable income integrating, unlike expenses, the money saved by the French.

The increase in the French housing budget can be explained in particular by the fact that their income has increased less quickly than rents and prices per square meter. Between 1998 and 2021, the median standard of living increased by 24%, when, at the same time, the rent index increased by 33% and the prices of old housing increased threefold (+200%).

These increases have hit the poorest households hard, especially since studies show that the burden of forced spending, particularly for housing, increases as the standard of living of households falls.

In 2022, the poorest spent 38% of their income on housing, according to the Abbé Pierre Foundation.