ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1
The Ferret originally downloaded 5,488 rental property listings in Scotland advertised on 16 January 2022 by the property search engine aggregator, Nestoria. We removed all 1,015 listings from Easyavvisi, a website which we found did not appear to show legitimate property prices after cross checking its listings with other websites.

We sorted the remaining 4,467 listings by cost and broke them down into into groups with a tenth of the properties in each (called percentiles). We then compared these percentiles with the 10 different percentiles of wages earned by individuals in Scotland, which we sourced from the Office of National Statistics' earnings data.

We focused on lowest rents (10th percentile) and median rents (50th percentile) as well as lowest wages (10th percentile) and median wages (50th percentile) to get a sense what share of their wages each percentile of earner would have to pay for each different percentile of rent.

We used median earnings rather than mean as, according to a Scottish Government analysis of ONS earnings data, using median values ensures the data “is less likely to be skewed by the relatively small number of very high earners”. We also used median rents rather than the mean for the same reason.

The hourly wage of the median-salaried job in Scotland was £14.29, £2,250 per month, or £27,000 per year, assuming full-time employment without overtime. Average rent in our snapshot represented 34 per cent of the average salary.

Due to a lack of recent household income data, we used ONS data to compare the wages of single earners against rents. We did not take into account any additional income sources, including Universal Credit, child or housing support, which vary from household to household.
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100