Real rental prices, percentiles and housing mix in Malasaña. (officially Malasaña-Universidad)
Median rent
€1,600/month
Mean: €1,807/month
Price per m²
28.8€
Madrid: 26.8€/m²
Median size
54 m²
Madrid: 62 m²
Listings analyzed
397
Idealista listings
Prices, percentages and counts are calculated from Idealista listings of the last few months.
Malasaña, officially the Universidad neighbourhood, is where most young arrivals in Madrid end up, and the first place nearly every guide names. It revolves around the Plaza del Dos de Mayo: vintage shops, street art, speciality coffee and a density of bars that is hard to match anywhere in Spain.
The tenants are young professionals, freelancers, artists and students, a large share of them foreign. Flats are small, with a median of 60 m², and they go for 26.7€/m², above the city average but below Sol or La Latina. With 504 listings analysed it is one of the busiest rental markets in the centre, which helps, because competition for anything decent is severe.
The case for it is simple: you can walk to Gran Vía, Chueca and Chamberí without touching the metro, and the neighbourhood has a real identity rather than a manufactured one. The case against it is noise. A flat above Calle Espíritu Santo on a Saturday night is a different proposition from the same street on a Tuesday morning. Ask which way the windows face.
Transport: metro lines L1 and L10 (Tribunal), L2 (Noviciado), L1 and L4 (Bilbao), with Gran Vía (L1, L5) five minutes away on foot.
36% of rental flats in Malasaña have one bedroom, followed by 31% with two bedrooms. Studios make up 21% of the supply, and flats with four or more bedrooms, 3%.
Lift. 61% of rental homes here have a lift. Six in ten homes have a lift. Nineteenth-century blocks dominate the streets and many were renovated without ever fitting one.
Private landlord or agency. 17% of listings are posted by a private landlord, against 83% that come through an agency. That is a middling proportion for Madrid.
The median rent in Malasaña is €1,600 a month. Most flats let for between €1,270 and €2,190 a month: a quarter of the supply falls below €1,270, and another quarter goes above €2,190.
Per square metre that works out at 28.8€/m². Applied to real floor areas, a 50 m² flat lands around €1,440 a month, a 70 m² flat around €2,020, and a 90 m² flat around €2,590.
Against the city as a whole, Malasaña sits in line with the Madrid median (€1,600/month), where the median price per square metre is 26.8€/m².
In Malasaña, only 10% of listings go below 21.2€/m². If you find a 70 m² flat at €1,480 a month or less, it is below the 10th percentile for the neighbourhood.
That does not make it a scam, but it is worth checking before you go any further. A price well below the local market is the single most common red flag in rental fraud.
For reference, the 25th percentile in Malasaña sits at 24.9€/m². Below that, the price is good for the area without being anomalous.
We check that our sample can support a trend before publishing one, and right now it cannot. At the number of listings we analyse per period in Madrid, splitting that same data in half at random already produces swings of more than 15%, with no change in the market at all. Any percentage we published would describe the size of our sample rather than rents.
The prices on this page are unaffected: a median needs far less history than a trend does. We will publish the change again once we can compare two long periods on the same coverage.
Looking for a flat in Malasaña right now? The good listings are gone within hours. Our Idealista apartment alerts notify you the moment one matching your search goes live, before everyone else sees it.
The median rent in Malasaña is €1,600 a month, which works out at roughly 29€/m². Most flats let for between €1,270 and €2,190 a month. These figures come from 397 Idealista listings over the last few months.
We do not publish a price trend for Malasaña yet. We check that the sample supports one, and for now it does not: the change we would calculate falls inside the margin of error of the sample itself. The median and percentiles on this page are sound.
61% of rental homes in Malasaña have a lift. Six in ten homes have a lift. Nineteenth-century blocks dominate the streets and many were renovated without ever fitting one.
Expect to be asked for your NIE (Número de Identificación de Extranjero) if you are a foreigner, your last few payslips or proof of income, your employment contract, and increasingly a bank guarantee or several months of deposit. None of it is a legal requirement of the contract itself, but applicants who turn up without the paperwork ready lose the flat to someone who has it. Assemble the folder before you start viewing.