A Reddit thread doing the rounds on r/perth asked the question every aspiring buyer in the city is quietly running through their head: how much more would you actually need to earn to afford the mortgage on a typical Perth home? It is not an abstract gripe. After years of relentless price growth, the gap between what Perth houses cost and what Perth households earn has become the defining money story of the city.
The number that started the argument
Perth's median value pushed past $1 million in early 2026, according to data from Cotality (formerly CoreLogic). By April 2026 the median dwelling value was reported at around $1.04 million, with house-specific medians quoted closer to $1.09 million depending on the measure used. Cotality's research director, Tim Lawless, has been widely cited describing Perth as the strongest-performing capital, with values up roughly 24 to 26 per cent over the year, depending on whether you look at houses or all dwellings.
Stretch the lens back further and the scale of the shift is stark. Domain's House Price Report for December 2025 had Perth's median house climbing about 91 per cent over five years — from roughly $568,500 in December 2020 to just under $1.09 million — effectively a near-doubling. Whatever exact figure you favour, the direction is not in dispute.
So what salary do you actually need?
Here is where the Reddit headline bites. Mortgage-affordability modelling published in 2026 estimates that servicing a median-priced Perth home now requires a household income somewhere in the region of $177,000 to $191,000 a year, depending on the exact median used and the assumptions baked in.
One commonly cited example, published by broker site Strawberry Finance, assumes a median around $1 million, a 20 per cent deposit of roughly $200,000, a loan near $803,000, and a variable rate around 5.9 per cent. On those numbers, monthly repayments land near $4,776, and keeping that under the standard 30 per cent-of-gross-income "mortgage stress" threshold implies an income of about $191,000. Other models using a slightly lower median land nearer $177,000. Either way, that is comfortably above the typical WA household income — which is exactly the squeeze Reddit users keep pointing to.
The double squeeze
It is not just the price tag. The cost of the debt itself has climbed. The Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate three times across early 2026, taking it from 3.85 per cent in February to 4.35 per cent by May, where it held in June. A buyer financing today's median is therefore carrying meaningfully larger monthly repayments than they would have a year or so ago. Higher prices and a higher rate hit the same buyer at the same time — the "double squeeze" that turns a deposit hurdle into an ongoing serviceability one.
That two-part problem is why so many of the thread's commenters reportedly described the same workaround: dual incomes are no longer a nice-to-have but effectively assumed; first-home-buyer schemes and the WA shared-equity options do real work; and the savings timeline for a 20 per cent deposit on a million-dollar home stretches into years for anyone without family help.
A reality check, not a verdict
A few caveats worth holding onto. "Median" is a blunt instrument — plenty of Perth suburbs still sit well below a million, and the income figure swings hard with your deposit size, the rate you lock in, and whether you treat 30 per cent of income as a hard ceiling or a guideline. The precise dollar figures above come from third-party modelling and market commentary, and different providers publish slightly different medians for the same month, so treat the ranges as indicative rather than gospel.
What is not really arguable is the trend the original poster was reaching for: the income you need to comfortably service a typical Perth mortgage has risen sharply, and faster than most pay packets. For a city that long sold itself on being the affordable capital, that is a genuinely new and uncomfortable conversation — and judging by the thread, Perth is having it in earnest.