What €400,000 Buys You: Dublin vs Cork vs Limerick vs Galway (2026)
€400,000 is a meaningful line in Irish house-buying. It's roughly what a median dual-income couple can borrow and afford with a solid deposit. So instead of comparing city medians in the abstract, we fixed the budget and asked the concrete question every buyer actually has: what does €400k put me in?
We took every home for sale between €375,000 and €425,000 within a short radius of each city centre — Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway — and measured what you get: bedrooms, floor area, house-or-apartment, and energy rating. The answer isn't subtle. The same €400,000 buys a compact two-bed in Dublin and a four-bed family house in Limerick.
But floor area is only half the question. So we then scored all four cities on quality of life — safety, amenities, environment, economy — and the two halves pull against each other. The city where €400k buys the most house scores the lowest on liveability. That tension is the real story.
The one-table answer
| City | What €400k typically buys | Median beds | Typical size | Houses | Cost of space |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dublin | A 2-bed apartment or compact terrace | 2 | 72 m² | 60% | €5,990/m² |
| Galway | A 3-bed semi / townhouse (or 2-bed apt near the centre) | 3 | 94 m² | 62% | €4,290/m² |
| Cork | A 3-bed semi-detached house | 3 | 105 m² | 94% | €3,880/m² |
| Limerick | A 3–4 bed house, often detached | 3–4 | 118 m² | 96% | €3,220/m² |
Read the two coloured columns together. In Dublin, €400k buys 72 m². In Limerick, the identical budget buys 118 m² — 64% more home for the same money. That gap is the whole article.
Dublin: €400k is a starter, not a family home
In the capital, €400,000 sits in the bottom third of the market — only about 30% of homes for sale in the city are priced at or below it, against a city median asking price around €515,000. What you get is a two-bed: roughly a 60/35 split between compact houses (older terraces, small mid-terrace stock) and apartments. The median floor area in the band is just 72 m².
The three-bed family house that defines “settling down” for most buyers is largely out of reach at this number inside the M50. At €400k in Dublin you are buying a first step onto the ladder, not the house you raise a family in.
Cork: €400k is the median home
Cork is the cleanest “normal” result. The city's median asking price is almost exactly €400k, so your budget lands you right in the middle of the market — about 52% of stock sits at or below it. And what €400k buys is unambiguous: a 3-bed semi-detached house of around 105 m². Apartments barely feature — 94% of homes in the band are houses. If your mental image of “a family home” is a three-bed semi with a garden, Cork gives it to you at exactly this budget.
Galway: pretty, and pricier than you'd think
Galway is the surprise. It's the second most expensive of the four — a city median asking price around €435,000, higher than Cork — so €400k actually sits just below the median (about 42% of stock). You typically get a 3-bed of around 94 m², but Galway is the only city outside Dublin where apartments meaningfully compete for your euro: roughly a third of the band is apartments, reflecting a tight, supply-constrained city core. You get more than Dublin, less than Cork or Limerick.
Limerick: the most home for the money
Limerick is where €400,000 stretches furthest by a distance. The city median asking price is around €355,000, so your budget sits comfortably in the upper third — about 64% of the market is cheaper than what you can spend. That buys a 3–4 bed house averaging 118 m², and detached and four-bed homes are common in the band in a way they simply aren't in Dublin. It is, on the numbers, the best space-per-euro of the four cities.
Why the gap: you're buying square metres, and they cost wildly different amounts
Strip out beds and house-versus-apartment and the cleanest way to see the difference is the price of a single square metre of home in each city:
| City | Median €/m² | m² for €400k | vs Dublin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dublin | €5,990 | ~72 m² | — |
| Galway | €4,290 | ~94 m² | 28% cheaper space |
| Cork | €3,880 | ~105 m² | 35% cheaper space |
| Limerick | €3,220 | ~118 m² | 46% cheaper space |
A square metre of home in Dublin costs roughly 1.9× what it costs in Limerick. That single ratio explains the whole comparison: the €400k budget is constant, so as the price of space falls from Dublin to Galway to Cork to Limerick, the house you can buy with it gets steadily bigger.
The catch: more space isn't more life
A bigger house in a city you don't want to live in isn't a bargain. So we scored all four cities on the same six-dimension Quality of Life framework we use across BuyerIQ — safety, infrastructure, family & community, education, environment, and economic health — each built from public data (Garda crime figures, CSO Census, the Pobal deprivation index, EPA water quality, transport and school locations). Affordability is deliberately left out, so cheap cities aren't just rewarded twice.
| City | Quality of Life | Safety | Infrastructure | Environment | Economy | €400k buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galway | 68 | 61 | 81 | 88 | 55 | 94 m² |
| Dublin | 66 | 54 | 93 | 75 | 56 | 72 m² |
| Cork | 62 | 61 | 88 | 64 | 51 | 105 m² |
| Limerick | 58 | 42 | 83 | 62 | 40 | 118 m² |
The ranking is almost the mirror image of the price table. The city where €400k buys the most home — Limerick, at 118 m² — scores lowest on quality of life (58/100), held back by the weakest safety (42) and economic-health (40) dimensions of the four. The two highest-scoring cities, Galway (68) and Dublin (66), are precisely where €400,000 buys the least floor area. Read city by city:
- Galway — 68, the highest. Wins on environment (88: coast, blue-flag beaches, green space) and family & community. The catch is the one from the price table — it's the second-dearest city for space, so the lifestyle is real but you buy fewer square metres for it.
- Dublin — 66. Untouchable on infrastructure (93: DART, Luas, bus, hospitals, fastest broadband) and jobs. But its city-wide average hides the widest internal spread of the four — it holds both the country's top-ranked area and mid-table ones — its safety (54) trails Cork and Galway, and €400k buys the least room anywhere on this list.
- Cork — 62, the balance. No category-leading score, but no weak one either: joint-safest (61), strong infrastructure (88), and — crucially — €400k buys a genuine 3-bed, 105 m² house. It's the only city that pairs top-tier safety with a proper family home at this budget.
- Limerick — 58, most space, lowest score. Strong on family & community and unbeatable on space per euro, but the lowest safety (42, reflecting a higher recorded-crime rate in the Garda division) and economic-health (40) scores of the four. €400k stretches furthest here — the honest question is whether that trade-off is one you'd make.
The hidden variable: what you'll pay to heat it
Space isn't the only thing that changes. The age of the stock at €400k changes too, and that drives running costs for the whole time you own it. In Dublin's €400k band, older, lower-rated homes dominate: E/F/G-rated homes outnumber A/B-rated ones by more than 1.5 to 1. Limerick and Galway are the mirror image — at this budget you're far more likely to be looking at newer A- and B-rated builds, where A/B homes outnumber the F/G stock several times over.
So the Dublin buyer isn't only getting less space — they're more likely to inherit a colder, more expensive-to-run home on top of it. The Limerick buyer gets more house and a lower heating bill. That compounds every winter.
How to use this when you're actually bidding
- City medians hide your budget. “Dublin is expensive” is useless. What matters is where your number sits in the distribution — €400k is the 30th percentile in Dublin and the 64th in Limerick. That percentile tells you whether you're fighting for scraps or picking from the top of the market.
- Compare on €/m², not on asking price. Two homes at €400k in the same city can differ by 30 m². The one that looks “dearer” on a price-per-metre basis is often the worse buy, even at the same headline price.
- Price the BER in. A €400k F-rated Dublin terrace and a €400k A-rated Limerick house are not the same purchase. Factor a retrofit (or years of higher bills) into the Dublin one before you decide it's “only” €400k.
- Weigh space against liveability, not in isolation. Limerick's extra 46 m² over Dublin is real — so is its 8-point-lower quality-of-life score. Decide which axis your household actually values before you let the floor-area figure win the argument on its own.
€400k in one city isn't €400k in another. Check the exact home.
Averages set the scene. Before you bid, run the specific property through BuyerIQ and see what the data says about it — not the city.
Methodology & sources
Figures are drawn from BuyerIQ's dataset of active for-sale listings (asking prices from Daft.ie and MyHome.ie), snapshot window April–July 2026, current to 3 July 2026. Each “city” is defined geographically as a radius around the city centre — Dublin ~9 km, Cork ~7 km, Limerick and Galway ~6 km — so results reflect the urban area, not the whole county (county figures would look cheaper, pulled down by rural stock). “What €400k buys” is the median home for sale between €375,000 and €425,000 in each city: median bedrooms, median floor area (excluding obviously mis-keyed sizes), and the house-versus-apartment split. Cost of space is the citywide median asking price per square metre. Percentiles describe where €400,000 sits in each city's full for-sale price distribution. Sample sizes in the €400k band: Dublin 869, Cork 234, Galway 131, Limerick 83 listings. These are asking prices, not final sold prices — homes in the most competitive cities tend to sell above asking, which would widen the Dublin gap, not narrow it. Point-in-time snapshot; we re-run rather than silently update it.
Quality-of-Life scores are BuyerIQ's published six-dimension composite — safety, infrastructure, family & community, education, environment, and economic health, equal-weighted, with affordability deliberately excluded so price isn't double-counted. Each dimension is built per Eircode routing key from Garda divisional crime rates, CSO Census 2022 small-area statistics, the Pobal HP deprivation index, EPA water quality, and open transport / school / healthcare location data, then aggregated to city level weighted by sales volume. Cork city here is the T12/T23 routing keys; Limerick (V94) and Galway (H91) are each a single routing key, so their score is a genuine city-wide figure rather than a neighbourhood average; Dublin averages 38 routing keys and therefore hides a very wide internal spread, from the country's top-ranked area to mid-table ones. The safety dimension is derived from recorded-crime rates per 1,000 population by Garda division — a statistical measure, not a judgement about any specific street or estate.
Sources: BuyerIQ active-listings dataset (Daft.ie, MyHome.ie), July 2026 · Property Price Register (propertypriceregister.ie) for the underlying valuation comparables · An Garda Síochána recorded crime by division · CSO Census 2022 & Pobal HP Deprivation Index · EPA water-quality data.