Homeownership is king in Malta but almost 30,000 families live in rented property

The monthly house loan repayment may weigh heavily on a family’s income but figures out today show that a majority of Maltese families live in loan-free houses.

The National Statistics Office said almost 60% of households, or 100,220, are mortgage-free and owned by the people living in them.

There are also another 31,561 homeowners (almost 19%) with a loan on their primary residence.

This means that 78.2% of families are home owners.

The statistics show that there are 8,208 families that live in free-of-charge accommodation – a vast majority of these are people without children.

There are 28,479 families, or almost 17%, that live in rented accommodation. The bulk of these (22,436) are families without dependent children and mostly made up of single people.

The NSO figures come from the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and relate to 2017.

Overcrowding increases with poverty

The survey found that the percentage of persons living in overcrowded households stood at 2.6%.

The overcrowding rate is defined by the number of rooms available in the household in relation to the household’s size and other demographics.

Among owner occupied households, the overcrowding rate stood at 1.5%, whereas the corresponding rate for persons living in rented dwellings was 7.8%.

The overcrowding rate was higher in poorer households. Overcrowding stood at 5.3% for persons who were at-risk-of poverty or social exclusion, whereas this rate stood at 1.9% for the rest of the population.