Britain's least affordable city - it was Oxford but n...

If you think house price indices are confusing, just look at affordability indices.

As recently as Monday BBC TV news reported that, on the ratio of house prices to average household income, Britain's most unaffordable location to buy was Oxford.

Today, according to online agent HouseSimple, it's Brighton.

According to figures compiled by the firm, an average wage earner in Brighton earns £23,488 annually so would need to save for 104.2 years to have a large enough deposit for an average priced property in the area - currently £350,222.

Perhaps surprisingly London is slightly (but only very slightly) more affordable with average salaries of £34,720 and average property prices of £492,026. Therefore the typical earner in London would have to save for 97 years to buy.

At the other end of the scale is Hull where average salaries are £24,248 and average house prices close to a third of the price of average property prices in Brighton, at £123,864. So the average wage earner in Hull would only need to save for 6.1 years to have enough for a deposit.

HouseSimple.com has looked at average salaries and average property prices in 20 major towns and cities across the UK. The figures have been calculated on the basis that savers could put aside 10 per cent of their salary every year for a house deposit, and that the maximum mortgage loan they could secure would be four-and-a-half times their gross annual salary.

“The average wage earner is being priced out of their local property market, and without a serious influx of new properties coming onto the market, that’s likely to continue to remain the case” says Alex Gosling, HouseSimple's chief executive.