In 2025, rents rose across Madrid, but one neighborhood stood out above the rest: Sanchinarro, in the Hortaleza district, where rents rose by 19.9% in just twelve months, almost double the city average. According to data from a study by Fotocasa, the average price in this neighborhood rose to around €20 per square meter, meaning that renting a 70-square-meter apartment now costs around €1,400 per month.
Sanchinarro was created as a new housing development in the early 2000s, designed for middle-class families looking for more space than in the center, but without straying too far from the city center. Two decades later, it has established itself as one of the major residential hubs in the north, with schools, shopping centers, and convenient connections to the M-30, M-40, and Castellana axis. This combination of residential developments, good transport links and relatively new buildings partly explains the strong demand, both from tenants who work in the nearby business areas (Cuatro Torres, Las Tablas, La Moraleja) and from owners who see the neighborhood as a safe investment.
Madrid, increasingly expensive and unequal rents
At the district level, Idealista data shows that Puente de Vallecas, San Blas-Canillejas, Vicálvaro, and Retiro were the areas where rents grew the most in 2025, with increases of between 10.5% and 12.8%, while the city average stood at 9.7%, reaching €22.7/m². Salamanca, Centro, Chamberí, and Chamartín remain the most expensive districts in absolute terms, with rents exceeding €25 per square meter, but the largest percentage increases are increasingly concentrated in neighborhoods that until recently were considered alternative or peripheral.
This shift in pressure towards Sanchinarro, Ensanche de Vallecas, and neighborhoods in the south and east reflects a familiar pattern, known as spillover: when the central core reaches its ceiling, demand jumps to cheaper areas within the city, which in turn drives up prices there and pushes new groups towards the metropolitan area.
Living in Sanchinarro in 2026: an example of a real bill
Image courtesy of: Jumbero / Wikimedia Commons
Translated into concrete numbers, the snapshot of Sanchinarro is impressive . With annual growth of 19.9% between December 2024 and December 2025, the neighborhood has gone from being a “reasonable” alternative to approaching the level of many established areas in the center. Today, renting a 90-square-meter apartment costs around €1,800 per month, not including a garage or storage room.
This illustrates well what is happening in the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Madrid, because it is no longer the Golden Mile where rents are rising the most comparatively, but rather in a development designed twenty years ago to alleviate prices in the center. Anyone moving to Sanchinarro now will pay almost €250 more per month than just a year ago for the same three-bedroom apartment.