• Data from various sources indicates that private rents in Belfast have risen by around 50% in five years.
  • The most recent data comes from ONS, stating that average rent in October 2025 was £1,121 – up by 52.1% since October 2020 (£737).
  • Research from UU and the Housing Executive indicates that rents rose 44.6% between the second half of 2019 and the second half of 2024 (from £699 to £1,011).
  • This claim featured in an article in the Financial Times, which also included a chart suggesting Belfast had the fastest growing rent of all major cities in the UK.
  • That assertion is not so clear cut, and depends on the sources used. Data from ONS suggests Belfast had the fourth highest rent growth among UK cities.

In a 12 December article published in the Financial Times, Queen’s University Belfast Economics Professor Richard Ramsey claimed that rents in Belfast had:

“Gone up 50% in five years…we have never had a rental boom till the last five years – but we have that now.”

The claim that rents in Belfast have risen by 50% in five years is supported by evidence from different sources.

Ulster University and the Housing Executive produce comprehensive biannual reports on the Northern Ireland rental market. The most recent such report covers the second half of 2024, and found that average rents in Belfast were £1,011 – compared with £699 in the equivalent report in the second half of 2019. This represents a rise of 44.6%.

Meanwhile, more recent data is available from the Office for National Statistics. ONS data indicates that, in October 2025, the average rent in Belfast was £1,121 – a rise of 52.1% since October 2020 (when average rent in the city was £737).

The same article also features a graph indicating that Belfast had the fastest growing rent in any major UK city, based on the 12 months to July 2025, with rent rising around 9% in that time.

This is not necessarily the case – it depends what data you use. The Financial Times was citing evidence from property portal Zoopla. However, ONS data tells a different story, suggesting Belfast rents rose 7.5% in that 12-month period and that this was only the fourth highest rise among UK cities.

These variable findings come down to different datasets and different methodologies.

For more information, read on.

  • Source

FactCheckNI contacted Prof. Ramsey about this claim but, at the time of writing, had received no reply.

  • Figures

There are various data sources concerning the private rental market in Belfast.

Ulster University (UU) and the Housing Executive (HENI) prepare biannual reports – the Northern Ireland Rental Index – while other sources include the Office for National Statistics (ONS). LINK

The most recent UU/HENI report covers rents in the second half of 2024. In those reports, data for Belfast covers the Belfast City Council Area (although there is data on five subareas: North, South, East and West Belfast and the city centre). According to that report, the average (mean) rent in Belfast at that time was £1,011.

To compare that with five years previously, we can look at the UU/HENI report for the second half of 2019, which found that the average rent in Belfast at that time was £699.

Between the second half of 2019 and the second half of 2024 rents increased from an average of £699 to an average of £1011 – a rise of 44.6%.

This figure is not exactly a 50% rise but is close enough to be fairly described as that scale of growth, so there is evidence to support the claim.

Furthermore, this is not the only source of rental costs. The most recent data at the time of the claim that FactCheckNI could find about rents in Belfast comes from ONS, and shows that, at October 2025, the average price of rents in Belfast was £1,121.

Looking at ONS time series data, we can see that the average rent five years prior, in October 2020, was £737 – meaning rents have risen by 52.1% in that five year period, according to ONS data.

Taken altogether, there is clear evidence to support the claim that rents in Belfast have increased by 50% in five years.

This might seem like a challenging rental market for consumers. However, there is at least an indication that the rate of growth of rents in Belfast is slowing down (although this is not the same thing as rents coming down). According to ONS: 

“Private rents in Belfast averaged at £1,121 a month in October 2025. This was an increase from £1,054 in October 2024, a 6.4% rise.”

This 6.4% annual rise is also quite a bit lower than increases in some other recent years. This can be seen in the chart below:

Figure 1 – source: ONS

  • And another thing

The Financial Times article also includes a chart suggesting that Belfast has seen the most rapid rate of growth in rental prices among major UK cities:

Figure 2 – source: Financial Times

Is this correct?

That may depend on how you look at it. For instance, ONS data seems to suggest something different.

The line chart below was created using data provided by the ONS. It depicts the rise in rent as a percentage compared to the previous 12 months. Each data point is from July of that year (July is chosen to reflect the data used by Zoopla). According to this date, the percentage rise of Belfast’s rent in July, 2025 was 7.5%. 

Figure 3 – source: ONS

In fact, based on ONS data, in the year to July 2025 Belfast only had the fourth highest increase in private rents among major UK cities, at 7.5% year-on-year. Cardiff (9.3%), Liverpool (9.5%) and Newcastle (12.0%) were all higher.

Why might these calculations be different?

  • Methods

Note that different data sources can use different methodologies to calculate their estimates for average rental prices in a given area.

The main data input for rental data compiled by Zoopla is current listings on their platform. Zoopla’s data source is different from the other estimates of rent referenced further up in this article. The UU/HENI reports gather data from both Property News and the Housing Executive while ONS uses data collected from the Housing Executive to build its estimates.

Different data sources are one reason why calculations of rental costs might be different. Another reason for this divergence is what different researchers actually do with that data.

Zoopla adjusts its data to reflect the difference between asking prices and actual rents.  The ONS approach is to use Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR), which is one standard way to estimate rental costs over time, and which “reflects price changes for all privately rented UK properties, not only newly-advertised rental properties.” (More information on the ONS approach can be found here.)

Different approaches have their different merits, and different datasets can be fine – but, in this case, they raise a red flag for the Zoopla analysis. By using its own rental listings as the spine of its data, Zoopla is basing its own work on a smaller sample size than ONS, because Zoopla is not a major provider of rental housing in Northern Ireland.

At the time of writing, Zoopla only has 14 rental properties listed in Belfast:

Figure 4 – source: Zoopla

Property News, however, has 762:

Figure 4 – source: Property News

The problem is not that Zoopla’s chart (Figure 2) is not based on evidence, it’s that the evidence used may be much less compelling than is found in analyses elsewhere, such as with the ONS (which relies on HENI data).