In Germany, research by the Moses Mendelssohn Institute and the online portal for students looking for a room, WG-Gesucht, put the average monthly rent for a room in a shared flat in university locations at €493 ($571) for the summer semester of 2025. In Munich, it was as much as €800 ($927). The housing allowance within Germany’s BAföG, the state’s student support system, was €380 ($440) a month, not even half of this.

Matthias Anbuhl, head of the German student services association Deutsches Studierendenwerk, warned that high rents were forcing students from poorer families to choose where to study according to housing costs rather than their academic interests.

Across Europe, then, the problem is the same: the cost of accommodation for students exceeds the total of all the supports available to students and their families.

Migration Adds to the Pressure

The reason for this is not hard to fathom: it is immigration that is bringing millions of additional people to Europe's cities and creating competition between locals and immigrants for scarce and affordable housing.

Officially, supply is central to the problem. For example, the London report mentioned above identifies construction costs, operating costs and regulatory requirements among the pressures on rents and development. But any serious discussion must also examine demand, including migration, and what happens when governments use existing accommodation to meet emergency needs.

Ireland provides a concrete example of the overlap.

According to the Department of Justice, 195 contracts for accommodation used by people fleeing Ukraine ended in 2025, releasing nearly 12,000 beds for other uses. That included almost 1,800 beds returned to the student accommodation sector.

Those figures establish beyond any doubt, officially, that student accommodation was used for the emergency response to the war. They also establish that beds have been returned. What they do not show, and what the government is reluctant to comment on, is how many beds remain in use by refugees from Ukraine or elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the conflict between the two needs was sufficiently serious to prompt intervention. Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ reported in February 2025 that the Department of Further and Higher Education had raised concerns about continuing contracts with former student accommodation centres. The departments agreed that beds should return to student use when possible.

There is a separate question about the incentives offered to households.

Ireland’s Accommodation Recognition Payment was introduced to support people hosting those displaced from Ukraine. By March 2025, roughly 20,250 active claims covered accommodation for approximately 37,500 people. The payment then stood at €800 ($927) a month, before being reduced to €600 ($696) from June that year.

Announcing the change, then children’s minister Norma Foley said the scheme had “unlocked a valuable source of accommodation”. Her department also explicitly acknowledged concerns about its potential effect on private rental supply.

This is important, because there is considerable anecdotal evidence that the scheme influenced the choices of families who were used to taking a student lodger, but who switched to hosting Ukrainians instead. The number of people hosted cannot simply be counted as the number of students displaced.

The government has since tightened the scheme. From March 2026, new applications became ineligible where the property had been registered with the Residential Tenancies Board at any point since 4 March 2022. That restriction was as close to an open admission as the government will ever make that its immigration policies had displaced students.

Ireland is simply the example for which most data is available directly connecting immigration and the accommodation shortage, and the example in which a direct connection can be made. But of course, the bigger problem can be seen elsewhere, and understood intuitively.

A Europe-Wide Competition for Housing

Students, no matter where they are based, tend to occupy the lower rungs of the rental market. They do not generally rent penthouse apartments or enormous brick homes. Instead, they compete for flats and house-shares, of the kind that are also popular with lower-income migrants.

It stands to reason that as migrant numbers in a city increase, the demand for housing at the lower rungs of the property ladder will also increase. And migrants have an advantage: Unlike students, their demand is not seasonal. A student may only need to rent for nine or ten months of the year, starting a new lease every September. Migrants, by contrast, can provide landlords with certainty and, in many countries with rent support schemes, a higher level of rent.

There is one final point here: it has been well established over several decades that the population of young people is actually in decline, with falling birth rates and fertility levels. This should, in theory, mean fewer students chasing more rental properties. But in reality, the student accommodation crisis has bitten in Europe at the same time as the migrant crisis. That is not a coincidence.

Nor is it a coincidence that student voters tend disproportionately to favour the very policies that appear to be harming them. Across Europe, young voters, especially young women, are the leftmost members of the electorate.

Is that doing them any good? Not in material terms, anyway. But that has ever been the way: it is much easier to blame greedy landlords and capitalism than it is to come to terms with the possibility that policies supported by one’s peers are actually making one worse off. It was ever thus.