Moving to Barcelona, answered.

The last full quarter in the deposit registry, 2026 Q1, averaged €1137 a month across 8,156 registered contracts. That is up 20.4% since 2019 Q1. It matters that these are contracts people actually signed and registered a deposit against, not what a listing asked for: portal asking prices run visibly higher, and they are what most guides quote without saying so. That figure is for a whole flat. A room in a shared flat is the number most students need, and the median across the 41 places we profile is about €600.

Of the 41 we profile, the lowest median room rents are Bellaterra (UAB) at about €420, Vallcarca at about €480, Horta at about €480, Santa Eulàlia (l'Hospitalet) at about €480. The highest is Diagonal Mar at about €800, so the spread across the city is roughly €380 a month for a room. Cheap is rarely the whole story though: the places at the bottom of that list are further out, and what you save on rent you can spend twice over in commuting time. Every neighbourhood page shows both figures next to each other for that reason.

That depends far more on which campus than on which university, and several institutions have campuses at opposite ends of the city. We publish a page per institution showing how long it takes to reach its campuses from every neighbourhood we profile, on foot, by bike, by Bicing, by metro and bus, and by car. The times are modelled from published TMB average speeds rather than routed through a journey planner, so treat them as a fair comparison between neighbourhoods rather than as a timetable.

We deliberately do not publish a crime figure per neighbourhood, and it is worth knowing why rather than assuming we forgot. Reported crime rises with tourist density, so the central neighbourhoods look alarming largely because more incidents get reported there, not because living there is dangerous. Publishing that number would push people away from perfectly liveable areas on the strength of a statistic about pickpocketing near a cathedral. What we do show is street comfort, which is district-anchored and labelled as an estimate, and we say plainly on every page that it is our read rather than a measurement. Petty theft is genuinely common in the tourist core; violent crime is rare by European city standards.

Barcelona is a declared tensioned zone, which means rent caps can apply. Whether they bind your particular contract is a different question and it depends on the contract type, on whether your landlord is a large holder, and on which reference index was used. What is established is that Llei 11/2025, in force since 1 January 2026, brought seasonal contracts and room rentals under the caps, which previously sat outside them. The useful thing to do is ask the landlord or agency which reference index they applied and what the previous contract's rent was, in writing, before you sign anything.

LAU (Ley 29/1994) article 20.1, as amended by Ley 12/2023, puts agency fees on the landlord for a habitual residence contract. Whether that reaches seasonal contracts is not settled, and you will still meet agencies that ask. If you are asked for a fee, ask which contract type they are offering and on what basis the fee is charged. Moveable never charges a rental commission itself, which is a permanent rule rather than an introductory offer.

We do not have data on this and will not invent it. What our own dataset does show is turnover: some neighbourhoods churn far faster than others, which is a reasonable proxy for how often something comes free. Each neighbourhood page ranks its turnover against all 73 neighbourhoods in the city and says where the figure came from.