Tirana Apartment Prices, 2020–2026: The Full Trajectory

Tirana apartments roughly doubled in six years, from about 1,000 euros per square metre in 2020 to 1,863 euros by the second quarter of 2025. Almost all of that happened in two years, 2023 through the second half of 2024, and the second half of 2024 alone ran 56% year on year. Then the market went flat.

The full trajectory, year by year

Six years, roughly a doubling in price, and nearly all of it packed into 2023 through H2 2024 before the market went flat. That shape tells you more than any single-year number. A market that runs hot for eighteen months and then plateaus behaves differently from one that climbed steadily the whole time, and careful buyers price it differently.

The gap between what's asked and what's paid

One widely cited listing-aggregator tracker showed asking prices in the centre up 44-50% from 2024 to 2025. Transaction data from the Bank of Albania's own index and Keydata's transaction-based figures shows a real move over the same period, but a clearly smaller one. Sellers are anchoring to the boom-year headlines instead of current demand. Before you treat an asking price as the market rate, check which figure you're looking at: listings and closed sales produce different numbers.

The plateau wasn't the same everywhere

A citywide 0% quarter-on-quarter figure hides real divergence between districts. The New Boulevard's second line rose 36% in the same twelve months the city as a whole went flat. No other district DomLivo tracks moved faster, and a specific master-plan catalyst drove it rather than general market momentum. So the plateau describes a citywide average slowing down. Districts did not all slow at the same rate, and the ones still moving usually have a driver of their own instead of riding the general 2023-2024 wave.

Sales also take longer. Average time to sell in Tirana stretched from 7.1 months in H2 2024 to 8.1 months in H2 2025, a full extra month. As a signal of buyer hesitation, that is far more direct than the headline price figure.

What the government's own numbers say

Albania's official reference prices form the base for annual property tax. Across Tirana they average 124,300 lek/m² (about €1,270), and behind that average sits the widest reference-price spread of any Albanian city. At the top is Blloku, at 228,400 lek/m² (about €2,330), the country's single highest reference zone. At the bottom is Paskuqan, at 62,500 lek (about €640). A spread of roughly 3.7 times inside one municipality shows that "Tirana's price" was never one number. The reference prices also have a practical use. They are the tax base for the annual property tax, currently 0.05% of fiscal value, and they set the floor for the notary's fee and for the seller's 15% tax on the gain: if a private contract quotes below the zone reference, the tariff uses the reference figure instead of the contract price. A district's reference price follows you into every future tax bill.

The variable nobody's pricing in yet: supply

Building permits hit a record 1.9 million square metres in 2024 alone. Supply on that scale takes one to three years to reach the market as finished, sellable units. The H2 2025 price plateau doesn't fully account for it yet, because most of it is still to come. It is arguably the biggest unpriced variable in any 2026 forecast for the city, bigger than any single quarter's transaction data.

What the trajectory signals for 2026

A market that ran +56% and then flattened to 0% has got ahead of its own fundamentals. It is now waiting for incomes or the record supply pipeline to catch up, and it shows no sign of resuming its old pace. Whether that makes 2026 a good time to buy is a separate question with its own honest answer. The trajectory itself argues for more caution about projecting 2024's headline growth rate forward than most listings currently price in. That caution now rests on six years of data, not on one quarter's read.