When Dan Darragh moved to London in 2022, he planned to keep his housing expenses low by living with a roommate. Four years later, he has five of them.
“I justify it because of the cost,” said Mr. Darragh, a 36-year-old contractor in the finance industry, who pays 900 pounds, or about $1,225, a month for his share of a six-bedroom house in Queen’s Park, a neighborhood in northwest London.
A rising share of adults 35 and older in Britain live with roommates to save money, according to SpareRoom, a listings site. This age group accounted for around a third of people who used the site last year to find shared accommodations, up from about a fifth a decade earlier.
“I think, particularly in London, it’s a lot more the norm now,” said Mr. Darragh, who moved to the capital from Coventry. “I know very few people that actually live alone.”
Britons devote more of their spending on housing than their counterparts in almost every other developed economy, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think tank. But for their money, they get less floor space per person than in most other countries. Many rental properties no longer have living rooms, to make way for an extra bedroom.
Keeping up with the cost of living in London is especially hard. The average home in the city sells for more than £550,000, far more than elsewhere in Britain, pushing more people into the rental market.
Monthly rent in London averages about £2,200, and the median annual earnings in the city are around £46,000 before taxes. London’s housing costs defy most measures of affordability, such as guidelines from financial experts who say housing should not exceed 30 percent of income.
“The cost of housing in particular has risen so fast, there’s no way salaries are going to keep pace with that,” said Matt Hutchinson, the communications director at SpareRoom.
London generates nearly a quarter of Britain’s economic output. The country’s fiscal watchdog recently forecast that economic growth would come in at 1.1 percent this year, down from 1.4 percent last year.
Liam Sides, an associate director in the cities and regions team at Oxford Economics, an advisory firm, blamed economic sluggishness on the high cost of housing, saying it was “a factor in what’s driving stagnation in London’s productivity.”
He added that expensive housing made London’s economy less dynamic by preventing people from moving closer to better-paying jobs, leading to labor shortages and productivity-sapping commutes. International workers may think twice about moving to London in the first place.
People also have less money to spend after devoting so much of their budgets toward housing, he added.
Vlad Drigin moved to London 10 years ago from Estonia. Mr. Drigin, 30, is a data analyst at Oaktree Capital Management in central London, where he lived with three people last year. He has since moved to a high-rise in Canary Wharf, a financial district in East London.
He now has just one roommate, Hana Nisametdinova, a 27-year-old friend from Estonia who works in data analysis at Barclays nearby. Together, they pay £3,100 a month in rent.
The neighborhood has a reputation for being a bit distant and sterile, but “the value is much better than anywhere in central London,” Ms. Nisametdinova said.
Mr. Drigin said he would consider buying a home, but he would have to move farther away to afford it. “Renting it seems like a better option,” he said.
Facing the daunting costs of London housing, more young adults in and around the city are opting to live with their parents for extended periods. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research group based in London, found that the share of 25- to 29-year-olds who lived in a parental home in Britain increased to 28 percent in 2024, from 20 percent in 2006.
“That was one factor that pointed us toward declining housing affordability,” said Bee Boileau, a research economist at the institute.
Living at home for longer allows Londoners to save money, but when the time comes to move out, they may need to cast the net wide. Britons tend to live farther from jobs than their counterparts in most European countries, the Resolution Foundation found.
High rents in London are increasing competition for homes in commuter towns. Demand for rooms in shared accommodation in Esher, a town about 15 miles outside London where the average rent is £740 a month, jumped 32 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 from the year before, SpareRoom found.
The best way to ease the housing crunch is on the supply side of the equation, Ms. Boileau said. “The classic ‘Econ 101’ answer is get more houses on the market,” she added.
The mayor of London has adopted a target for the number of new homes to be built this decade, roughly 52,000 per year. But over the past five years, completions have consistently run behind schedule, resulting in a shortfall of tens of thousands of units that should have been finished by now.
Gregory Schmidt is a Times business editor overseeing coverage of the European economy. He is based in London.
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