House prices in Bulgaria rose 15.5%: which cities are rising fastest

Photo: Plovdiv, Nikolay Demirev / Pexels

House prices in Bulgaria rose 15.5% over the year. These are preliminary figures from the National Statistical Institute (NSI) for the second quarter of 2026, published on 23 September; compared with the first quarter, prices added 4.5%. For context, prices across the European Union were rising by 5.1% a year at the start of 2026, while Bulgaria was at 14.8% over the same period. The Bulgarian market is moving almost three times faster than the European one.

The NSI index is based on the prices of actual housing transactions in cities, calculated separately for new and existing homes, rather than on asking prices in listings. In other words, it shows what buyers actually pay.

Plovdiv up, Burgas down

The NSI reports six cities with more than 120,000 residents. Prices rose fastest in Plovdiv, up 5.8% over the quarter, twice as fast as in Sofia. Burgas is the only city where prices fell: down 1.5%. The remaining cities are in the table at the end.

One caveat: these are changes against the previous quarter, that is, over just three months. The NSI does not publish annual figures for individual cities in this release, so a single quarter is not enough to call Burgas a falling market. There are several possible explanations, from the seasonality of the coastal market to the mix of transactions in the quarter, but this data cannot confirm any of them. If you are choosing between cities, it helps to look at the wider picture: we compared Sofia, Varna, Burgas and Plovdiv separately.

Will house prices fall?

So far the growth is not even slowing. A year ago, in the second quarter of 2025, prices added exactly the same 15.5%. The calmest of the past seven quarters was the end of 2025, with growth of 12.6%.

There is something holding the growth up. The average rate on new housing loans in July was 2.43%, almost the same as a year earlier, and households' total mortgage debt grew 25.7% over the year. The number of transactions, meanwhile, is falling: 45,965 were registered in the second quarter against 56,010 a year earlier, almost 18% fewer. But one does not follow from the other: when some buyers come with a bank's money, fewer transactions alone do not pull prices down.

The most interesting part of this data is the split by type of housing. New builds rose 12.3% over the year, while existing homes rose 17.6%. Existing homes have outpaced new builds for six quarters in a row, and the gap widened again over the past three months: it was 3.8 percentage points in the first quarter and is now 5.3.

This is clearest in the South Central region, which includes Plovdiv: new builds there added 6.3% over the year, existing homes 22.7%. A caveat: the NSI calculates these figures by statistical region rather than by city, so they cannot be applied directly to a particular city.

For a buyer, this leaves little reason to expect a cheaper market: the data shows no sign of prices turning down. New builds, however, are still rising more slowly than finished housing, and the price of a specific apartment depends on more than the NSI index. We looked separately at what makes up the real cost per square meter.

Prices by city, Q2 2026

Sources: NSI, "House price statistics — Q2 2026" (23.09.2026) and house price index series by type of dwelling and statistical region (preliminary data for the second quarter); Eurostat, house price index for the EU and Bulgaria; Registry Agency, registration statistics for Q2 2025 and Q2 2026; BNB, "Interest rate statistics" and "Monetary, credit and deposit indicators" for July 2026 (27.08.2026).