How much do you need to earn to live in London?

Gross salary is the wrong number to budget with. What matters is what reaches your account after income tax and National Insurance, and that is a smaller fraction than most people expect.

On £35,000 you take home roughly £2,390 a month. On £50,000 it is about £3,290. On £70,000 — a salary that sounds comfortable — you are looking at roughly £4,260, because the 40% band starts biting at £50,270. Doubling your gross from £35k to £70k adds well under double to your take-home.

If you have a student loan, subtract more. Plan 2 repayments are 9% of everything above the threshold, and they leave before the money is yours in any practical sense.

The common guidance is to keep rent under about a third of take-home pay. We use 35% as the default across this site because it is roughly where finances stop feeling merely disciplined and start feeling tight.

It is a ceiling, not a goal. At 35% you can absorb a boiler failure, a dentist, or a month between jobs. At 45% you are one unexpected bill from a problem. Past 50% you are, in a real sense, working to pay a landlord.

London routinely pushes people past that line, which is exactly why sharing remains normal here well into people's thirties in a way it is not in most of the country.

A room in a house share across the areas we track generally runs from around £900 a month at the cheaper end of outer London to comfortably over £1,300 in central postcodes. Rooms usually include council tax and often bills, which is worth more than it sounds — call it £150 to £250 a month of costs you are not separately paying.

Working backwards at 35%: a £950 room needs about £2,715 of take-home, which is roughly a £40,500 salary. A £1,100 room needs about £3,145 of take-home, or roughly £47,500.

You can obviously do it on less, and plenty of people do. But you are then either spending a higher share of your income on rent, or living further out and paying the difference in commuting time and fares.

Here the number moves sharply. A one-bed flat in the cheaper areas we track starts around £1,400 a month, and the London-wide median sits well above that. Unlike a room, you then pay council tax, energy, water, broadband and every standing charge on top — realistically £250 to £350 a month more.

So a £1,500 one-bed is really closer to £1,800 of committed monthly housing cost. At 35% of take-home that implies about £5,145 a month in the bank, which is north of an £88,000 salary.

Relax the rule to 40% and the required salary drops to around £75,000. That is the honest range: living alone in London, without stretching uncomfortably, is a £75,000-plus proposition across most of the city. Below that, the 25% single-occupancy council tax discount helps a little, and moving to Zone 4 or beyond helps considerably more.

Rent is the headline, but three other things reliably catch out people who have just arrived.

As a working answer: around £40,000 to share comfortably across most of London, around £30,000 to share if you go further out and accept a longer commute, and somewhere between £75,000 and £90,000 to live alone depending on how far from the centre you will go and how strictly you hold the 35% line.

Those are starting points for your own arithmetic, not promises. The salary pages on this site run the same calculation for a specific figure and then show you which areas actually fit the result.