I'm in the exact situation as OP. As a result, I'm moving to lower cost area and continue as a remote worker. Shameless plug: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/aw

I'm in the exact situation as OP. As a result, I'm moving to lower cost area and continue as a remote worker. Shameless plug: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job 20% down payment + stamp duty tax is roughly 130k. There is also a nonzero risk of the property bubble. Only Hong Kong is worse in terms of property purchasing power for average salary. There are serval reasons for high prices: - Market is heavy regulated. - UK doesn't have any land and estate tax. - Developers oligopoly is hoarding the land to keep the prices. - Foreign investor are using properties as a insurance for rainy days. - Interest rates are low and inflation is high, so people are pumping money into real estate market. - Councils cannot build council housing any more. - Bank of England schemes to buy. It's an unfortunate situation. Extreme misallocation of capital which is bound to cause problems in the future. Money don't flow to companies and productive investments, hence there is no growth and the wages are stagnant. What is more, it makes it really expensive to start a company. What's the solution? 1% estate tax with 80% discount if you pay taxes in UK (British Columbia passed a new property tax and it works well for them[1]). For an average person there would be no change - they would pay estate tax instead of council tax directly or indirectly. That would cause 25-30% price drop in London[2]. Why government won't do it? It would piss off a lot of powerful people which own real estate. Significant portion of the population has bought properties to rent and that price drop could make them go bankrupt. This is an unsolvable problem given the extreme divide in British society, since the Brexit vote. There won't be enough political will to pass the laws. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12160680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12160680 [2] - my estimation given other big cities salary to price ratio.