SUMMARY
Yes. For most mortgage-financed owner-occupiers, now is a better time to buy in Warsaw than last year, even though the apartments themselves are not cheaper.
The headline market has actually moved the other way. CBRE's average asking price for a new Warsaw apartment rose 6.9% year on year to PLN 19,405/m², so anyone waiting for an obvious citywide price correction has not got one.
The interesting change is underneath the asking price. Apartments that actually sold had been listed at a lower average than the stock still sitting on the market, and estimated transaction prices remain well below some of the more eye-catching portal averages.
Mortgage costs have improved much faster than apartment prices. A competitive variable-rate offer in the low-5% range can cut hundreds of złoty from a monthly payment compared with a similar loan around 6.6% a year earlier.
That financing shift is large enough to offset much of the price increase. In the 55 m² example used below, the apartment costs about PLN 69,000 more, yet the monthly mortgage payment can still come out roughly PLN 350 lower.
Warsaw also has a lot of stock developers would rather not keep carrying. More than 3,300 completed apartments were still unsold in the latest quarter, giving buyers leverage that is easy to miss if we only look at official price lists.
Wages have roughly kept pace with new-build prices. Warsaw enterprise-sector pay rose 6.6% while CBRE's new-build asking-price measure rose 6.9%, so the income-to-price relationship has stopped deteriorating as quickly as it did during the boom.
Demand is recovering, which cuts both ways. Cheaper credit brings more buyers back into the market, so the same rate cuts that improve affordability also make a large citywide price fall less likely.
Landlords benefit less from the change than owner-occupiers do. Warsaw rents have barely moved in several size bands while purchase prices rose much faster, leaving rental yields fairly compressed even after financing improved.
For many buyers, district selection matters more than waiting another year. A several-thousand-złoty-per-square-meter gap between central and cheaper outer districts can dwarf any plausible one-year move in the citywide average.
The practical conclusion is fairly simple: do not rush, but do not wait for a dramatic Warsaw-wide correction either. The better opportunity today comes from cheaper financing, completed inventory and negotiation room, not from lower sticker prices.
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Are Warsaw apartments cheaper than last year?
No. Warsaw apartments are still more expensive than they were a year ago, even though buyers currently have more ways to push the final price down.
CBRE measured the average asking price of a new Warsaw apartment at PLN 19,405 per square meter at the end of the second quarter, up 6.9% from PLN 18,153 a year earlier. At those averages, a 55-square-meter apartment moved from roughly PLN 998,000 to PLN 1.07 million.
That headline increase needs some context. The apartments actually selling tend to be cheaper than the stock sitting online. CBRE found that homes sold during the quarter had previously been offered at an average PLN 18,585 per square meter, around 4% below the average price of everything still available.
Otodom data tell a similar story from another angle. Warsaw developer asking prices briefly pushed above PLN 20,000 per square meter as expensive projects entered the mix, while estimates of actual transaction prices were much closer to PLN 17,000–18,000.
So someone waiting for Warsaw apartment prices to become visibly cheaper has not been rewarded. What has changed lately is the gap between the advertised market and the deals buyers can actually make.
| Warsaw new-build market | A year ago | Latest available data | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average asking price | PLN 18,153/m² | PLN 19,405/m² | +6.9% |
| Approx. cost of 55 m² at that average | PLN 998,000 | PLN 1.07m | +~PLN 69,000 |
| Apartments available | 17,011 | 16,345 | -3.9% |
| Quarterly sales | 2,897 | 3,840 | +32.6% |
So why is Warsaw a better market for buyers now?
For a mortgage buyer, Warsaw is currently easier to buy into because financing has improved faster than apartment prices have risen.
A year ago, buyers were already seeing the first benefits of Poland's rate-cutting cycle, but mortgage pricing was still noticeably worse. Today, WIBOR sits around the high-3% range, bank margins on variable mortgages are near multi-year lows and a good borrower can find offers a little above 5%.
At the same time, Warsaw still has more than 16,000 developer apartments for sale. CBRE counted 3,344 finished but unsold homes in the latest quarter, equal to 20.5% of the entire offer. That is the highest share recorded in its data.
Those two changes work together. Buyers can finance a property more cheaply while negotiating against developers carrying thousands of homes that are already finished.
Headline apartment prices therefore give a misleading answer to the question. Warsaw itself is more expensive, but the buying conditions are better.
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How much cheaper is a Warsaw mortgage now?
A good variable-rate mortgage can cost hundreds of złoty less each month than a comparable loan did a year ago.
Bankier.pl's mortgage ranking last year showed competitive variable-rate offers around 6.6% for its standard PLN 592,000, 25-year loan. One example at 6.65% produced a monthly payment of roughly PLN 4,052.
In Bankier.pl's latest detailed ranking, Bank Pekao offered 5.22% for the same PLN 592,000 loan, with a PLN 3,537 monthly payment. Bank BPS was at 5.47% and PLN 3,624.
Using the Pekao example, the monthly difference versus 6.65% is about PLN 515, or almost PLN 6,200 a year. Even the 5.47% offer cuts the payment by around PLN 428 a month.
Banks have also become more competitive on margins. Bankier.pl calculated an average variable-rate mortgage margin of roughly 1.8 percentage points recently, down from about 2.0 points a year earlier and 2.3 points two years earlier.
Fixed-rate offers have moved less dramatically, so borrowers choosing a five-year fixed period will not capture the entire improvement. Still, financing a Warsaw apartment is clearly cheaper today for a strong borrower.
| PLN 592,000 mortgage over 25 years | Around a year ago | Recent competitive offer | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interest rate | 6.65% | 5.22% | -1.43 pp |
| Monthly payment | ~PLN 4,052 | PLN 3,537 | -PLN 515 |
| Annual payment difference | — | — | ~PLN 6,180 |
| Typical variable-rate bank margin | ~2.0 pp | ~1.8 pp | -~0.2 pp |
Have cheaper mortgages cancelled out Warsaw's higher apartment prices?
For some buyers, almost. The improvement in borrowing costs is now large enough to offset much of Warsaw's price increase.
Take the average new-build prices measured by CBRE. A theoretical 55-square-meter apartment cost about PLN 998,000 a year ago and roughly PLN 1.07 million at the latest average.
With a 20% deposit, the mortgage rises from about PLN 799,000 to PLN 854,000.
If the older loan carried a 6.65% rate, the monthly payment would be roughly PLN 5,470 over 25 years. At a 5.22% rate today, the larger PLN 854,000 mortgage comes to roughly PLN 5,120 a month.
That means our buyer could pay around PLN 69,000 more for the apartment yet roughly PLN 350 less each month on the mortgage.
The catch is the deposit. A 20% down payment increases by nearly PLN 14,000, and transaction or finishing costs do not disappear. Cash requirements are still higher.
But monthly affordability has moved in the buyer's favor. Anyone judging Warsaw purely by price per square meter is missing a big part of the market.
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Are Warsaw salaries rising fast enough to keep up with apartment prices?
Just about. Warsaw wages and new-build asking prices have been rising at almost the same speed.
According to Warsaw's labour office, average gross pay in the city's enterprise sector reached PLN 11,185 in the latest published reading, 6.6% higher than a year earlier.
CBRE's Warsaw new-build asking-price measure rose 6.9% over a similar annual comparison.
So the average salary has essentially kept pace with the price of a square meter. That is already an improvement from periods when housing prices were running far ahead of wages.
Mortgage buyers get an extra benefit because borrowing costs have also fallen. Someone earning about 6–7% more while qualifying for a mortgage at a rate more than one percentage point lower is in a better position than the price chart alone suggests.
We should not overstate it: Warsaw housing has not suddenly become affordable. A PLN 1 million apartment still requires a very high household income or a large deposit. But affordability is no longer deteriorating at the pace buyers experienced during the strongest part of the housing boom.
| Annual change | Latest comparison |
|---|---|
| Average Warsaw enterprise-sector wage | +6.6% |
| Average new-build asking price per m² | +6.9% |
| Competitive variable mortgage rates | Down by roughly 1 pp or more |
| Practical result | Income-to-price ratio broadly stable, financing easier |
Are Warsaw buyers coming back now?
Yes. Warsaw housing demand has clearly recovered, and the latest mortgage data suggest that cheaper credit is still pulling buyers back into the market.
Developers sold 3,840 Warsaw apartments during the second quarter, 32.6% more than in the same quarter a year earlier. CBRE also calculated nearly 16,000 developer sales over the latest 12 months, up 38.5% from the preceding 12-month period.
National mortgage data are pointing in the same direction. BIK's latest reading showed the value of mortgage applications running 9.3% above a year earlier. The number of applicants was up 7%, while the average requested mortgage reached PLN 525,700.
The annual growth rate has cooled from July, when mortgage enquiries were up 22%, partly because today's figures are being compared with a much stronger market than they were earlier in the cycle. BIK itself highlighted that base effect.
The bigger picture is still clear: more households can borrow again, and they are already acting on it.
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Do Warsaw buyers still have room to negotiate?
Yes. Demand is stronger, but Warsaw buyers currently have enough unsold stock to make sellers compete for them.
CBRE counted 16,345 new apartments available at the end of the second quarter. Developers had launched 4,753 homes during those three months, 66.8% more than in the previous quarter, so supply actually increased despite healthy sales.
The strongest source of leverage is the finished stock. There were 3,344 completed but unsold developer apartments. Some had already been sitting on the market since late last year.
A developer holding a completed apartment has a stronger reason to close than one selling a unit that will not be delivered for another two years. That can show up as a direct discount, a cheaper parking space, storage included in the deal, help with finishing or better payment terms.
That same completed-inventory figure is also why we should be careful with citywide asking prices. Sellers can keep the official price list high while quietly improving the actual deal.
The market is busy enough that the best apartments will not sit around forever, but there is still much more room to negotiate than the headline price trend suggests.
Are Warsaw developers actually cutting prices now?
Some are effectively doing so, although the adjustment is showing up more clearly in new projects and promotions than in broad price-list cuts.
CBRE found that apartments launched during the second quarter entered the market at an average PLN 18,593 per square meter. That was 8.6% below the average price of launches in the previous quarter.
Part of that drop came from geography and project mix. Developers brought more relatively affordable stock to market rather than suddenly cutting every existing unit by 8.6%.
For a buyer, though, the competitive effect is real. A new project at PLN 18,500 per square meter puts pressure on an older nearby development asking PLN 20,000 for a similar apartment.
Developers also have good reasons to avoid obvious list-price reductions. A large official cut can upset earlier buyers, hurt valuations and reset expectations across the rest of a project. Incentives are less visible.
That is why people searching Warsaw today should ask about the full package rather than only the advertised square-meter price.
| Warsaw developer market | Latest reading |
|---|---|
| Average price of all available new homes | PLN 19,405/m² |
| Average price of newly launched homes | PLN 18,593/m² |
| New-launch price vs previous quarter | -8.6% |
| Completed unsold apartments | 3,344 |
| Share of total offer already completed | 20.5% |
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Is the Warsaw second-hand market easier to negotiate now?
For ordinary resale apartments, yes. The difference between asking prices and completed deals is large enough that accepting the portal price blindly makes little sense.
Recent datasets built from Warsaw transaction records place completed deals around the mid-PLN 16,000s per square meter in many citywide comparisons, while asking prices are several percent higher.
Even a 5% negotiation gap means PLN 45,000 on a PLN 900,000 apartment and PLN 60,000 on a PLN 1.2 million property.
Of course, there is no universal 5% discount. A renovated apartment beside a metro station can sell almost immediately. An awkward unit with a bad layout or a seller anchored to last year's portal prices may need a much larger reduction.
The useful habit today is to compare a listing with recent transactions from the same micro-area, ideally the same development or surrounding streets. Warsaw prices vary too much for a citywide average to tell us whether one particular resale apartment is expensive.
For buyers willing to do that work, the second-hand market currently offers much better opportunities than the headline listings suggest.
Will waiting another year get us a cheaper Warsaw apartment?
Probably not by enough to make waiting an obvious choice.
Several conditions that would normally produce a large nominal fall are missing. Warsaw sales have recovered, mortgage demand is growing again, wages are rising and developers are moving thousands of homes each quarter.
There is plenty of supply, so flat prices or selective discounts remain very plausible. Some developments could get cheaper, especially where completed inventory accumulates or several projects compete for the same buyer.
A citywide fall of 10% or 20% is much harder to support with current evidence.
There is another problem with waiting for lower prices: lower interest rates can attract buyers faster than they push developers to cut prices. We have already seen that dynamic begin. BIK recorded 33.1% more housing loans granted nationally in July than a year earlier, while its latest enquiry data still show year-on-year growth.
Someone postponing a purchase for one year is therefore making two bets at once: that apartment prices will improve and that stronger borrowing power will not bring enough competing buyers back to erase that advantage.
Today, we would not make that bet unless the apartment available now is clearly overpriced.
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Could Warsaw mortgage rates get much cheaper if we wait?
They could improve further, but waiting for another huge drop in mortgage rates looks much less compelling now.
WIBOR 3M was about 3.82% in Bankier.pl's latest detailed variable-rate comparison. With competitive bank margins around 1.5–1.8 percentage points, that puts strong mortgage offers in the low-to-mid 5% range.
A further fall in market rates would obviously help. Another 0.5 percentage point off a PLN 800,000 mortgage can still save a meaningful amount each month.
But the biggest shift from very expensive credit toward normal-looking mortgage rates has already happened. Bank margins are also close to multi-year lows, leaving less room for banks themselves to transform the economics again.
There is no need to perfectly time the bottom either. A borrower who buys a good apartment at a sensible price can later refinance or renegotiate if mortgage offers become materially cheaper.
Waiting makes sense when today's apartment is wrong or overpriced. Waiting purely because we expect mortgages to become dramatically cheaper carries more risk than it did a year ago.
Is Warsaw a better buy now for landlords and cash investors?
Much less clearly. Today's improvement strongly favors mortgage-financed owner-occupiers, while Warsaw rental investors still face fairly compressed yields.
Recent Otodom Analytics data put average Warsaw asking rents around PLN 2,976 a month for apartments below 40 square meters, PLN 3,888 for 40–59 square meters and PLN 6,056 for 60–89 square meters.
Those rents were up only 0.3%, down 0.3% and up 1.5% year on year respectively. New-build asking prices, meanwhile, rose 6.9% in CBRE's annual comparison.
When the purchase price rises much faster than the rent, gross yields get squeezed.
Lower mortgage rates partly help leveraged landlords, but a financing cost around 5–6% still leaves little margin once we include vacancy, service charges, repairs, tax and transaction costs.
Cash buyers also miss the biggest improvement available to borrowers: cheaper debt. Their advantage today comes mainly from negotiating power and the ability to close quickly.
So Warsaw is currently a better buying environment for someone looking for a home than for someone buying an average apartment and expecting an easy rental return.
| Warsaw asking rent by size | Latest level | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| Under 40 m² | PLN 2,976/month | +0.3% |
| 40–59 m² | PLN 3,888/month | -0.3% |
| 60–89 m² | PLN 6,056/month | +1.5% |
| New-build asking prices | PLN 19,405/m² | +6.9% |
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Does the Warsaw district matter more than waiting another year?
Often, yes. Changing district can save far more money than a plausible one-year movement in the citywide housing market.
Recent asking-price comparisons put Śródmieście above PLN 25,000 per square meter, while Żoliborz and Wola can exceed PLN 22,000–23,000. Białołęka, Wawer and some parts of Rembertów sit much closer to PLN 14,000–15,000.
For a 55-square-meter apartment, a PLN 7,000-per-square-meter difference is PLN 385,000. It would take an enormous citywide correction to create the same saving by simply waiting.
The cheaper district is not automatically the smarter purchase. Białołęka and other development-heavy areas can face plenty of future competition, while established central neighborhoods have scarce land and stronger transport.
Still, Warsaw buyers sometimes obsess over whether prices will fall 3% next year while ignoring a 20–30% price gap between locations that could both work for them.
For many households, choosing the right district currently matters more than predicting Warsaw's next annual price move.
Is now a better time to buy in Warsaw than last year?
Yes. For most mortgage-financed owner-occupiers, Warsaw offers a better buying setup now than it did a year ago, even with apartment asking prices roughly 7% higher.
The financing improvement is large enough to change the calculation. Competitive variable mortgage rates have fallen into the low-to-mid 5% range, while Warsaw wages are up about 6.6%. In a realistic example, a buyer can finance a more expensive apartment today and still end up with a lower monthly mortgage payment than someone buying the cheaper equivalent a year earlier.
Sellers also face more competition than the rising price indices imply. There are more than 16,000 developer apartments available, including a record share of completed homes, while newer launches have lately come to market below the average price of existing stock.
There is no reason to rush into a bad apartment. Rental yields remain unexciting, cash buyers benefit much less from today's changes and anyone paying the first asking price they see can still overpay badly.
But for a household that already wants to live in Warsaw for several years, waiting for a broad correction has become a weaker strategy. Demand has recovered, mortgage applications are still growing and apartment prices have shown little willingness to fall across the city.
We would rather buy a well-negotiated Warsaw apartment today than wait another year simply hoping that the whole market gets cheaper. The better opportunity comes from cheaper financing and stronger bargaining power, and both are available already.
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OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether Warsaw is a better market for buyers than it was a year ago. We do not answer that from one apartment-price index, because purchase prices, mortgage costs, wages, demand, inventory and negotiating conditions can move in different directions at the same time.
We split the question into separate parts and used the freshest meaningful data for each one. CBRE is the main source for Warsaw developer asking prices, sales, new supply, total available inventory and completed unsold stock. Otodom is used for asking-price composition, rental-market data, secondary-market context and district-level price differences.
Financing is treated separately from housing prices. Bankier.pl's standardized mortgage comparisons are used to compare variable and fixed offers on consistent loan assumptions, while WIBOR and bank margins help explain why the cost of borrowing has changed. The National Bank of Poland's policy decisions provide the broader interest-rate backdrop.
Mortgage demand is measured with BIK data. We use its application index, applicant counts and granted-loan data as evidence that credit demand is recovering, but we do not use national mortgage figures as a substitute for Warsaw apartment sales.
Purchasing power is checked against Warsaw wage data from the city's labour office. That lets us compare the annual change in enterprise-sector pay with the annual change in new-build asking prices rather than assuming that a higher apartment price automatically means affordability deteriorated by the same amount.
We keep asking prices and transaction prices separate. Portal averages can be pushed around by the mix of projects entering the market, and official developer list prices can stay high even when the effective deal improves through discounts, parking, storage, finishing packages or better payment terms.
For time comparisons, we favor like-for-like annual readings where possible and use shorter quarterly or monthly changes only when they reveal a meaningful shift in direction. Mortgage examples are kept on consistent loan terms so the change reflects prices and financing rather than a different borrower profile.
Forward-looking sections do not try to predict an exact Warsaw price one year from now. Instead, we test whether the usual ingredients of a broad correction are visible across sales, mortgage demand, wages, available stock and financing conditions, then make a judgment from the combined evidence.
Key sources used for this analysis include: CBRE on the Warsaw primary market in Q2 2026, CBRE on the Warsaw primary market in Q2 2025, Otodom on Warsaw asking prices and transaction-price estimates, Otodom on the latest developer-market conditions, BIK's August 2026 mortgage-demand index, Warsaw Labour Office wage data, Bankier.pl's August 2026 variable-rate mortgage comparison, Bankier.pl's October 2025 comparison, and the National Bank of Poland's 2026 Monetary Policy Council decision.
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