There is no international consensus on how to define or measure housing affordability, and no single measure fully captures the range of concerns around the ability of households to secure decent housing in an appropriate location for an acceptable price.

Relatively straightforward measures that are based on data that are readily available in most countries, such as house-price-to-income and housing-expenditure-to-income ratio measures, provide an association of housing prices (or spending) relative to income levels. More data-intensive indicators, such as residual income measures, focus on the income households have left after paying for housing. These can be complemented by housing quality measures, which assess what households are paying for, as well as subjective indicators of housing affordability that can help better understand the determinants of housing satisfaction (Ezennia and Hoskara, 2019).