What a student room costs, according to registered contracts
Student rents are growing faster than the rest of the market. But the figure that gets shared doesn’t say what it seems to. What the Italian Revenue Agency’s numbers really show.
Listings say one thing, friends another, Facebook groups something else again. To know what a student room really costs, it’s worth looking at the one source that sees every contract: the Italian Revenue Agency, which registers every new lease and publishes the statistics every three months.
There’s a limit to state straight away. The Agency separates «subsidised student» contracts, the regulated-rent leases designed for university students, from everything else. Many students, though, rent on ordinary contracts, which aren’t distinguished in those statistics. So these numbers describe one part of the market well, not all of it.
Growing faster than everything else
In the third quarter of 2025, rooms rented to students on a subsidised contract numbered 28,663, 15.2% more than in the same quarter of 2024. The total annual rent of those contracts reached 118 million euros, up 18.5%. For whole flats rented to students, growth was 9% in number and 14.9% in rent.
Over the same period the whole rental market grew much less: +2.5% homes with a new contract and +7.1% in total rent. The student segment is the one moving fastest.
The number that gets shared, and the real one
Here’s the trap. That +18.5% is about total rent, not the price of a single room. If there are more contracts, the total goes up even at the same price.
Doing the maths on the published data, the average annual rent of a room on these contracts is about 4,100 euros, around 340 euros a month, against about 4,000 euros a year earlier. An increase of around 3%. Most of the growth is in the number of contracts: more students using regulated rents, more contracts registered.
Rome and Milan
In Rome, in the third quarter of 2025, rooms rented to students on a subsidised contract numbered 4,915 (+14.9%) for a total rent of 30 million (+19.5%). On average that’s about 500 euros a month per room, bills excluded.
In Milan they numbered 1,073 (+12.9%), with total rent up 26.1%. That’s very few for a city with nearly two hundred thousand students, and the Agency points it out: despite the large student population, in Milan and Bologna short-term subsidised contracts remain a tiny share of all rented homes, around 0.5%. In practice, in these two cities almost every student rents at market conditions.
For a sense of the level, in 2025 the average rent of short-term subsidised contracts for whole homes was 182.9 euros per square metre a year in Milan, 142.5 in Rome and 87 in Bologna.
What it means if you’re looking
Two practical things.
First: the lowest prices are in regulated-rent contracts, which are few and go quickly. Anyone who arrives in the city already as a group, with flatmates they know they get on with, can move earlier and look at whole flats too, instead of competing for one room at a time.
Second: a cheap room with the wrong people is expensive anyway. You pay in sleepless nights, badly prepared exams, sometimes a second move halfway through the year. The right price is the one for a home where you can live well.
The average values per room are our own calculation on the totals published by the Revenue Agency, which are rounded to the million: read them as orders of magnitude.
Sources
- Quarterly statistics, Residential, Q3 2025Italian Revenue Agency, Real Estate Market Observatory (OMI), accessed on 29 September 2026
- Real Estate Report 2026, Residential sectorItalian Revenue Agency, Real Estate Market Observatory (OMI), accessed on 29 September 2026
- Students enrolled «In Sede/Fuori Sede», 2010/11 to 2024/25 (file 14c)Italian Ministry of University and Research, Statistics Office, accessed on 29 September 2026
