“Me in 2001 being born instead of saving to rent an apartment”. This and other variables are a recurring generational joke with which, with a touch of irony, young people face the arduous reality of finding a rental apartment at reasonable prices in Madrid. They are not the only ones who are affected, but they are one of the groups that is suffering the most from the rise in rental prices. But, how much have they gone up in these years?
To answer this question we have turned to the Internet archive: WayBack Machine. It is a tool with which users can upload screenshots of a website and keep them as if they were a digital library.
For the experiment we have gone back a decade, to the year 2015, to check how were the prices in the ads of the time in one of the most popular real estate portals: Idealista.
Rental prices in Madrid 10 years ago
Diving among the ads published on the portal in 2015 draws attention, for example, to a 72 m² apartment in San Andrés street (Malasaña-Universidad) with two bedrooms, without elevator, for €680 per month. In a current ad consulted dated June 3, 2025, a 66 m² apartment with one bedroom on Calle de las Minas -same neighborhood- costs 1,750€/month (and has a 5% discount applied).
Another striking example from a decade ago is that of a 50 m² exterior apartment located in the Palacio de la Prensa building, in the heart of Gran Vía, with elevator, for 975€/month.
To put this last data in perspective: with that same budget (975€), and consulting the same real estate portal, today it would not be enough to rent an interior semi-basement without elevator of the same surface and number of rooms in the neighborhood of Arapiles (Chamberí).
The rise in the price of the square meter of rent is not only evident, but also historical: according to a report by Idealista itself, Madrid set an all-time record in December 2024 with a price of €20.70 per square meter (15.3% more than the previous year). As of today, the average price reported by the real estate portal is 27.04 euros/sqm.