Construction prices for new residential buildings across the European Union increased by 48.2% between 2015 and 2025, according to new figures published by Eurostat.
The data refers to the producer price index for the construction of new residential buildings, excluding residences for communities. The index reflects prices from the point of view of building contractors and is based on what clients pay to contractors for construction work. It is not the same as house-sale prices, which also include land prices, margins, location premiums and other market factors.
The increase was especially sharp during the post-pandemic inflation surge. Eurostat recorded EU-wide annual increases of 5.8% in 2021, 12.2% in 2022 and 6.9% in 2023. Growth then slowed to 2.3% in 2024 and 1.3% in 2025.
Malta has not been immune to this construction-cost shock. The country experienced one of the sharper increases during the 2021 surge, according to Eurostat’s construction price overview, before recording a rare decline of 0.2% in 2023, when most other EU countries continued to register increases.
The latest Eurostat-linked reading for Malta’s construction cost index stood at 121.4 points in December 2025, with the index based on 2021 = 100. This means that construction costs remained more than one-fifth higher than the 2021 benchmark, despite the easing that followed the steep increases of 2021 and 2022.
Malta therefore sits in a different category from the EU’s most extreme cases. The three biggest increases over the 2015–2025 period were recorded in Bulgaria, where construction prices rose by 166.1%, Hungary, where they rose by 155.4%, and Romania, where they increased by 130.7%.
These figures show that the sharpest construction inflation was concentrated in eastern Europe, where building costs more than doubled over the decade. Malta’s increase has been severe, but it did not reach the explosive levels recorded in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
At the other end of the scale, the slowest increases were recorded in Italy, at 17.0%, Greece, at 17.3%, and Finland, at 22.1%. These countries saw much more contained price growth than the EU average.
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