What a home costs, city by city.

Both lines start at 100 in 2010. The blue line is the price of a home in rupees. The gold line divides it by consumer prices, so it asks a different question: compared with everything else a family buys, have homes become dearer? When the blue line rises and the gold line is flat, homes are only keeping pace with inflation.

Real prices matter for the buyer who must save for a deposit out of a salary that also rises with inflation. Nominal prices matter for the seller and for the size of the loan.

The gap between the two lines is roughly the rate of consumer price inflation. Above zero, the real line says homes got dearer than other things; below zero, cheaper. In the early 2010s prices rose by a fifth a year in rupees and well ahead of inflation; since then the two lines have drawn close.

Each bar is one city's index at the end of the 2010-11 series. Because every city starts at 100, the bar's length is the city's own rise since 2010-11, not its price level: a short bar in Mumbai does not mean Mumbai is cheap, only that its prices rose less from an already high level.

The RBI builds each city's index from sales registered with the state, comparing like with like as far as the records allow. In a single quarter only a few thousand homes may sell in a city, and the mix changes: a quarter heavy with sales in an expensive suburb can push the index up without any flat getting dearer. One-year changes in single cities are therefore noisy; Kolkata's index rose by about half between late 2023 and mid-2025, then gave it all back within a year.

The RBI's index uses the prices recorded when a sale is registered. NHB's RESIDEX uses the values banks and housing finance companies put on homes when they lend against them, smoothed over four quarters. BIS's series is built from the RBI's. Different sources, different cities and different weights give different numbers; where they agree on direction, the direction is probably real.

Each bar compares a city's index with a year earlier. The moving average smooths out a single quarter's noise but makes turns show late, by up to a year. NHB also publishes each quarter on its own; both versions are in the data download.

Carpet area is the floor you can walk on, inside the walls; builders often quote a larger "super built-up" area, so a carpet-area price looks higher than an advertised one. These are averages over a whole city, from posh districts to the outskirts, of homes that someone took a loan to buy.

Each country's series is compiled by its own authorities and only harmonised by BIS, so small differences mean little. The comparison is useful for direction: whether homes are getting dearer than other things in most places, or only in some.