21241 – Household Leverage

Household Leverage (21241) measures how fast households are taking on housing debt relative to their income: the change over four quarters in housing debt as a share of annualised household disposable income, in percentage points. Higher readings mean housing debt is rising faster than income. It sits beside Household Finance & Spending (21240), which reads the composition of new lending, and is read alongside Debt-Servicing Burden (21242), which reads what the debt costs to repay.

Primary metric: Node Z-Score (Z₂₁₂₄₁)

Metric typology: single-series Z-score of a four-quarter change in a ratio.

Tier-1 central bank statistics compiled from sovereign statistical releases. No commercial data provider dependency exists within this node.

The chart shows the node’s reading in every quarter, measured against the 2011–2025 baseline.

At +0.6894σ (Q2 2026), housing debt rose 2.78 points faster than income over the year to June 2026, from 132.12% to 134.90% of annual disposable income. It is the largest four-quarter rise since June 2022 (+3.40 points). From March 2023 to December 2025 every four-quarter change was negative, as disposable income grew faster than housing debt; the change turned positive in March 2026.

Position. 49.7, ranked against 148 quarters since September 1989. The current rise sits near the middle of the record because the 1990s and early 2000s held much larger ones: the four-quarter change peaked at +11.59 points in March 2004.

Measured against the value of housing rather than income, households are less geared than over most of the past fifteen years: housing debt is 21.86% of housing assets, against a 2011–2025 average of 25.56%.

The other household burden nodes and the household finance node beside them.