If you’re moving to Norway, then you might want to look into buying a house for your family. Norway has plenty of houses in all sizes, and there’s even a good selection of smaller apartments for those of you that don’t need an entire house. While most people who move to Norway end up renting a house or apartment to begin with, getting to know the housing market is pretty smart.
So what’s the housing situation like in Norway, and how much money should you expect to pay for a house in Norway?
Houses are generally very expensive in Norway due to lots of rules and regulations that puts restrictions on the building materials. Expect to pay from around 1,500,000 NOK ($163,000) for the cheapest decent houses in rural areas, and 3,000,000 NOK ($326,000) or more for a house in a medium-sized city.
It’s obviously very difficult to just set a single price point for a house in Norway, because there will be hundreds or thousands of different factors that influence the price. As you can expect, older houses and houses in rural areas are far cheaper than modern houses and houses in popular cities, and the closer you are to the city center, the more expensive it is.
You can usually find a decent house to buy in most towns and medium-sized cities in Norway if you got around 2,500,000 NOK ($273,000), but you can also find cheaper houses if you want to live in an old house or a rural area.
However, if you want to buy a house in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim or any other big city, either prepare to pay a lot more, or to live very far from the city center.
Average price for houses in Norway makes very little sense to talk about
Many people really want to know the average price for a house in Norway, so let’s look at the number.
The average price for a house in Norway in March 2022 is 4,495,784 NOK or $489,757 USD.
The problem is that this is not really a good statistic to look at, because there are just too many factors that influence the price.
The most expensive places to buy a house in Norway
The most expensive places to buy a house in Norway is without a doubt in the Oslo region, and the most expensive areas are the ones that are close to the city center. This means places like Majorstuen, Torshov, Bygdøy and Sofienberg. These areas have a price of 90,000 NOK or more per square metre!
An average house in Norway is 160 m², which would put the price of a regular house there at 14,500,000 NOK ($1.6 million)! A quick search on Finn, the primary real-estate search aggregator shows this to be a bit conservative, with most of the houses there being up for sale for at least 20,000,000 NOK ($2.2 million).
Housing prices in Oslo
The median price for buying a house in Oslo in 2020 was 12.5 million NOK ($1.35 million). The municipalities just outside Oslo also has insane housing prices, and places like Bærum, Nesodden or Lørenskog all have a spot in the list of the municipalities with the highest house prices.
Housing prices in Bergen and Trondheim
The main city centers in the other big cities like Bergen and Trondheim can be expensive as well, but nothing that even hits close to Oslo. If you want a house to yourself in the middle of the city center in either of these cities, expect to pay around 6 – 8 million NOK ($650,000 – 870,000).
That’s still pretty expensive, but far more reasonable for a family to be able to buy without having an incredibly high income.
The cheapest places to buy a house in Norway
If you’re looking to buy a cheap house in Norway, then look for smaller towns and municipalities in south-eastern Norway or look very far north.
Some medium-sized towns like Notodden has the lowest average price point for a house in all of Norway, so you do not really need to move to the middle of nowhere to get a “cheap house”. Notodden is not the biggest or best of cities, but it does have over 12,000 inhabitants and a university. Keep in mind that these cheap houses still cost 1,500,000 NOK, so they’re not really cheap.
The regions Innlandet is the cheapest houses, followed by the district towns in Telemark. Generally speaking, the towns that are far from big cities and the coast tend to be the cheapest.
Many people are under the impression that the cities very far north in Norway are the cheapest ones, but they are actually not. They are just a little bit more expensive than the rural towns of south-eastern Norway, but they will still all have pretty affordable houses.
Can you buy a house as a foreigner in Norway?
Anyone can buy a house in Norway, and you do not need a residency card or a full Norwegian citizenship to be able to purchase a house. However, you might need all that if you actually want to live in the house you buy.
Most properties and houses in Norway comes without any restrictions, so you can buy it and do pretty much what you want with it. Foreigners can easily buy and flip properties, buy properties to rent out, or just buy a house for themselves without any issues.
There are a few exceptions to this, so make sure to learn about any local regulations before you commit to buying a house in Norway.
If you’re looking to get a house loan, then you will likely need to get founding from a Norwegian bank, and that will require you to have citizenship. You need to have at least 15 % of the money yourself, so you can only legally loan 85 % of the money from the bank.
Housing prices keep rising year after year
The housing prices in Norway keep rising year after year, and the trend is most noticeable in the cities and urban areas. As with the rest of the world, the bigger cities keep seeing an influx of new people that migrate from rural areas, driving the housing prices up i the city, and keeping it more even in the rural towns.
The value of houses in Norway has on average increased by around 5% every single year for the last 10 years.