€400,000. Four cities. Four completely different lives. In Dublin that money buys you a 72 m² two-bed flat; in Limerick the exact same budget puts you in a 118 m² house. Same number on the mortgage, a different front door entirely. And that's the whole point, because €400,000 is roughly what a median dual-income couple can borrow and afford with a decent deposit behind them. So instead of waffling on about “city medians” in the abstract, we asked the question you're actually asking at the kitchen table: what does my €400k put me in?
Here's what we did. 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 for the money: bedrooms, floor area, house or apartment, and the energy rating. No vibes, no estate-agent gloss. And the answer isn't subtle. The same €400,000 buys you a poky two-bed in Dublin and a four-bed family house in Limerick.
But floor area is only half the story, and if I stopped there I'd be doing you a disservice. So we also scored all four cities on quality of life — safety, amenities, environment, the local economy — and the two halves pull hard against each other. The city where €400k buys you the most house scores the lowest on liveability. That tension is the real story, and it's the bit nobody tells you.
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 and it jumps out at you. In Dublin, €400k buys you 72 m². In Limerick, the exact same budget buys 118 m² — 64% more home for the identical money. That gap is the whole article.
Dublin: €400k is a starter, not a family home
In the capital, €400,000 puts you 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 of 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 most people picture when they say “settling down” is largely out of reach at this number inside the M50. I'm not going to sugar-coat it: at €400k in Dublin you're buying your first step onto the ladder, not the house you raise the kids in.
Cork: €400k is bang on the median
Cork is the cleanest “normal” result of the four. 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 get a look-in — 94% of homes in the band are houses. If your mental picture of “a family home” is a three-bed semi with a bit of a garden, Cork hands it to you at exactly this budget. Fair play to it.
Galway: pretty, and pricier than you'd think
Galway is the one that'll surprise you. It's the second dearest 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 genuinely compete for your euro: roughly a third of the band is apartments, which tells you everything about how tight and supply-starved that city core is. You get more than Dublin, less than Cork or Limerick.
Limerick: the most home for the money
Limerick is where your €400,000 stretches furthest, and it's not close. 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 turn up in the band in a way they simply don't in Dublin. On the numbers, it's the best space-per-euro of the four cities, full stop.
Why the gap? You're buying square metres, and they cost wildly different amounts
Strip out the beds and the house-versus-apartment stuff and the cleanest way to see what's going on 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 one ratio explains the whole comparison: your €400k is fixed, so as the price of space drops from Dublin to Galway to Cork to Limerick, the house you can buy with it just keeps getting bigger.
The catch: more space isn't more life
Here's the bit I'd want a friend to tell me. A bigger house in a city you don't want to live in isn't a bargain — it's a long-term mistake with a nice hallway. So we scored all four cities on the same six-dimension Quality of Life framework we use right 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). We left affordability out on purpose, so cheap cities don't get rewarded twice for being cheap.
| 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 |
Look at that ranking and then look back at the price table — it's almost a mirror image. The city where €400k buys the most home — Limerick, at 118 m² — scores lowest on quality of life (58/100), dragged down by the weakest safety (42) and economic-health (40) scores of the four. The two highest-scoring cities, Galway (68) and Dublin (66), are exactly where €400,000 buys you the least floor area. Read them city by city:
- Galway — 68, the highest. Wins on environment (88: the coast, blue-flag beaches, green space) and on family & community. The catch is the one from the price table — it's the second-dearest city for space, so the lifestyle is real, you just buy fewer square metres to enjoy it in.
- Dublin — 66. Untouchable on infrastructure (93: DART, Luas, bus, hospitals, the fastest broadband) and on jobs. But that city-wide average hides the widest internal spread of the four — it holds both the country's top-ranked area and plenty of 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 glaring weak one either: joint-safest (61), strong infrastructure (88), and — crucially — €400k buys you 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. Your €400k stretches furthest here — the honest question is whether that trade-off is one you'd actually make.
The hidden variable: what you'll pay to heat the thing
Space isn't the only thing that shifts city to city. The age of the stock at €400k shifts too, and that quietly drives your running costs for the entire time you own the place. 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 just 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 smaller heating bill. That difference compounds every single winter you're there.
What to actually do with this when you're bidding
- City medians hide your budget. “Dublin is expensive” is useless to you. 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 pile.
- Compare on €/m², not on the asking price. Two homes at €400k in the same city can differ by 30 m². The one that looks “dearer” per square metre is often the worse buy, even at the identical headline price.
- Price the BER in before you fall in love. 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 on its own. 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 cares about before you let the floor-area figure win the argument by itself.
€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 actually says about it — not the city.