Home owners and people living in non-rent controlled rental housing are paying a smaller proportion of their income on living costs now than they did five years ago, according to a new report by ABN Amro economists.

Between 2019 and 2025, incomes increased by more than mortgages and rent, ABN Amro said in its latest housing market monitor. Nevertheless, tenants renting outside the rent-controlled sector are now paying up to 38% of their income on rent and living costs, compared with 28% for home owners.

Home owners who bought their properties years ago and have relatively small mortgages now have some two to three percentage points more of their net income to spend on things other than housing costs, but youngsters have just one percentage point more, the researchers said.

The situation is worse in the big cities. First-time buyers in Amsterdam are now spending some 30% of their income on housing, two percentage points more than in 2019. But home owners in general in the capital put 24% of their income into housing, three percentage points less than six years ago.

Matthijs Korevaar from Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam told the Financieele Dagblad that it is only logical that home owners who bought years ago have lower housing costs. In addition, first-time buyers, he pointed out, are paying higher mortgage interest rates than in 2019.

“But if you look at the percentage of youngsters who are buying a house, it is no lower now than it was in the 1980s,” he told the paper.

The Dutch central bank and other financial regulators have called on the government to phase out the generous system of mortgage tax relief in the Netherlands, but the new administration has opted not to do so.