Romania Is One of the Cheapest Places to Live in the EU. Spain Will Still Make You Sleep in Your Car If Your Payslip Looks Wrong.

🇷🇴 Romania · 🇪🇸 Spain

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Romania is, by one recent household-expenditure ranking, the second-cheapest country to live in across the entire European Union. Spain, meanwhile, had landlords in 2025 receiving an average of 41 inquiries per rental listing, with almost 27 percent of market-rate renters spending over 40 percent of their income on rent alone. Moving from the cheaper country to the pricier one sounds like the obvious downgrade. It is — but not for the reason most people expect.

Do's & Don'ts

🇷🇴 Romania

🇪🇸 Spain

Romania

Romania's living costs are genuinely, measurably low by European standards — a Newsweek Romania analysis using Eurostat data ranked it the second-cheapest EU country for total household expenditure, trailing only Poland. Rent, groceries, and services all come in well under Western European norms, and for a foreign professional earning a Western salary, the arbitrage can be dramatic. The catch sits specifically in the public systems that cheap living doesn't automatically fund well. A 2025 Eurostat figure reported by EduPedu found just 17.6 percent of Romanian children aged three to school-entry age who are at risk of poverty or social exclusion had access to 25 or more hours of weekly childcare or early education — against an EU average of 58.1 percent, more than three times higher. Romania ranked dead last in Europe on this specific measure, trailing even countries like Ireland and Austria that themselves sit well below top performers like Latvia and Belgium.

What this means in practice is that Romania's affordability and its welfare infrastructure are two separate stories that don't automatically travel together. Low costs make private solutions — nannies, private clinics, supplemental insurance — genuinely accessible even on a modest income, which is exactly how many middle-class Romanian and expatriate families fill the gap the public system leaves.

Spain

Spain inverts the equation almost exactly: stronger public systems, but a housing market that has become genuinely hostile to securing a foothold in them. Euro Weekly News reported that rental supply fell roughly 30 percent over three years following a 2023 housing law, while prices rose more than 30 percent over the same period — a supply-and-price scissors that pushed the average advertised rental to 41 inquiries, more than double the 2023 rate. The human cost of that squeeze was made starkly literal in one widely covered case: a Galician couple with a combined €2,345 in monthly income — unemployment benefits and a widow's pension — found themselves sleeping in their car because landlords required a permanent employment contract neither of them held. "Tonight we sleep in the car again," one of them told reporters. "We didn't receive any rental offer."

For foreign arrivals specifically, the barrier is structural rather than just financial. A Spanish government study on rental discrimination found foreigners twice as likely to be offered only short-term leases — 62.2 percent versus 34.8 percent for Spanish nationals — and guarantor requirements imposed on nearly a third of foreign applicants versus a fifth of domestic ones. Most strikingly, 72.5 percent of real estate agencies contacted for the study admitted to explicit racism in their practices, with 82.8 percent acknowledging indirect discrimination existed in the market more broadly.

The Reckoning

The honest comparison isn't cheap-versus-expensive — it's which gap you'd rather manage. Romania hands you affordability and leaves you to privately solve for childcare and supplemental health coverage; Spain hands you a stronger nominal welfare state and then makes you prove, repeatedly and on paper, that you deserve access to housing at all. Hofstede Insights data offers a clue to why Spain's bureaucracy feels so document-heavy: its uncertainty-avoidance score of 86 is among the highest in Europe, reflecting a cultural preference for rules, paperwork, and formal verification — exactly the instinct that turns a rental application into a dossier. Romania's own uncertainty-avoidance score of 90 is even higher, but it expresses itself less through institutional paperwork and more through reliance on informal networks — family, personal connections — to fill gaps the state and market don't cover.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

dragosroua.com — A Romanian programmer who relocated to Valencia described the financial relief plainly, paying "at or below half the price of the average rent in London," but the bigger surprise was social: his circle contracted sharply from a wide, draining network of acquaintances back home to a small, high-quality one in Spain, which he called "a huge relief" despite having objectively fewer connections.

Euro Weekly News — A Galician couple's case became a symbol of Spain's rental crisis: with €2,345 in combined monthly income from unemployment benefits and a widow's pension, they were turned away from every listing because landlords demanded a permanent employment contract. "Tonight we sleep in the car again," one of them said. "We didn't receive any rental offer."

The Olive Press — Reporting on Spain's own government-commissioned discrimination study found that foreign renters are offered short-term leases at nearly double the rate of Spanish nationals, and that a majority of surveyed real estate agencies openly admitted to explicit racism in their rental practices — a structural reality that no amount of financial preparation alone fully offsets.

Conclusion

If predictable, low-cost daily living matters most to you, Romania delivers it — provided you're prepared to privately fund the childcare and healthcare gaps the public system leaves wide open. If a nominally stronger welfare state matters more, Spain offers that, but be ready to spend months and a thick folder of payslips just securing a place to live in the first place, and understand going in that the process is measurably harder for foreign applicants than for Spanish ones. Either way, don't let the sticker price fool you: the real cost of living in either country is the system you'll need to navigate around, not the one printed on the listing.