Madrid - Spain

Madrid

Country: Spain

Population: 3506730

Metropolitan Population: 6,125,583

Elevation: 663.0 metre

Area: 604.4551 square kilometre

Web: https://www.madrid.es/

Mayor: José Luis Martínez-Almeida

Postal code: 28001–28080

Area code: +34 (ES) + 91 (M)

Overall score

Total

Amenities

Childcare & Education

A+

Commute

Culture & Entertainment

B+

Health

B+

NIMBY

Noise

A quick orientation: what the internal scores suggest (and what they do not)

The city scores provided for Madrid read like a pragmatic, day-to-day “liveability snapshot” rather than a scientific index with a published methodology. Without a transparent scoring rubric, it is best to treat them as an internal score: useful for framing expectations, but only credible when anchored to verifiable city data and observable urban conditions.

Amenities (A): how easy it is to run life—groceries, services, parks, sports facilities, errands, and day-to-day convenience across neighbourhoods.
Commute (A): the practical ability to move around—network coverage, service frequency, reliability, and the cost and simplicity of paying for trips.
Health (B+): access to healthcare, plus environmental factors that affect wellbeing (air quality, heat, noise) and the capacity of services under pressure.
Culture (B+): the depth of cultural life beyond “headline attractions”—venues, neighbourhood leisure, libraries, community events, and how easy it is to participate.
Childcare & Education (A+): availability and diversity of options (public, subsidised, private), how well the system serves families, and how predictable the pipeline feels in practice.
NIMBY (B): how hard it is to add housing and infrastructure—planning friction, local opposition, litigation risk, and the pace at which supply can respond to demand.
Noise (C): the likelihood of sleep-disrupting sound in real life—traffic corridors, nightlife clusters, flight paths, and how effectively the city mitigates the problem.
Total (A): a composite “works for most people most of the time” signal—often meaning trade-offs exist, but they are manageable with the right neighbourhood and routine.

Madrid in scale: a large city with a lived-in core

Madrid is not a small “capital with big-city amenities.” It is a city of metropolitan scale. The municipality covers about 60,445 hectares and has a population a little over 3.33 million. Those numbers matter because they shape daily life: a dense inner city with intense demand, and outer districts where space, commuting patterns, and housing typologies change quickly.

Housing: strong demand, fast-moving prices, and neighbourhood trade-offs

What the numbers imply

Housing is where Madrid’s “Total A” often gets stress-tested. Market indicators show a city that has become materially more expensive in a short time. For example, Idealista’s city-level market report lists an average rent of €22.7/m² in December 2025, up year-on-year, and an average sale price of €5,820/m² in the same month (also up sharply year-on-year). Those averages are not what everyone pays, but they shape the baseline for new leases and purchases.

At €22.7/m², a 50 m² apartment implies roughly €1,135/month in rent before utilities; 70 m² implies roughly €1,589/month.
At €5,820/m², a 70 m² home implies roughly €407,400 before transaction costs and financing.

These city-wide averages hide steep gradients. Inner districts with strong metro connectivity, walkable retail streets, and late-night activity tend to command premiums. More peripheral areas can offer better space-to-cost ratios, but the “price” often shows up as longer travel times, fewer walkable amenities, or more reliance on buses and transfers.

What “NIMBY (B)” looks like in housing terms

A NIMBY score of B suggests Madrid can build, but not frictionlessly. Large projects exist and are moving, yet they tend to progress through long planning and political cycles. A concrete example is Madrid Nuevo Norte, a major redevelopment with thousands of planned homes and significant new green space and facilities—an indicator that the city’s growth strategy relies heavily on multi-year, complex land-use deals rather than quick, incremental infill everywhere.

In practical terms, this kind of “buildability with delays” can mean housing supply responds to demand, but often too slowly to stabilise prices in the short run. For residents, the lived effect is that neighbourhood choice (and timing) matters as much as the city’s overall housing stock.

How housing choice typically plays out

Singles and couples prioritising centrality often accept smaller units, older buildings, or more street noise in exchange for walkability and fast transit access.
Families commonly trade some centrality for space, school options, and calmer streets—then try to “buy back” convenience with strong metro or Cercanías access.
Newcomers on mid-range budgets frequently find the best value in well-connected, non-central districts where amenities are decent but nightlife pressure is lower.

Transport and commuting: why “Commute (A)” is plausible

An integrated system with meaningful price signals

Madrid’s commuting advantage is less about any single mode and more about integration and scale: metro, urban buses, interurban buses, and commuter rail operating as a coordinated system in daily life. A key enabler is the region’s monthly travel pass: the CRTM describes the Abono Transporte as a personal pass enabling unlimited travel within a zone across multiple modes.

Cost matters because it changes behaviour at the margin. In late 2025, the Community of Madrid announced that public-transport bonifications would continue through 2026, including a widely used price point of €32.70 for a monthly Zone A pass and €10 for the Abono Joven, alongside discounted multi-trip products (for example, a 10-trip ticket at €7.30).

High usage is a sign of real utility (not just policy intent)

Ridership numbers help distinguish “good on paper” transport from transport that actually carries the city. Reporting based on CRTM figures described 1.722 billion public-transport trips in 2024 across major modes, with the metro accounting for hundreds of millions of journeys and the municipal bus operator also posting very high usage.

More recent reporting points to continued growth: EMT buses reportedly exceeded 512 million riders in 2025, and the city bike system logged 13.7 million trips. While media reporting is not the same as a technical audit, these magnitudes are consistent with a network that many residents treat as the default option.

What commuting feels like on an ordinary week

In practical terms, Madrid’s “Commute A” usually means three things:

Predictable travel for common patterns: commuting from established residential districts to business and university areas is typically feasible without driving.
Multiple viable commute options: when one line is disrupted, buses and alternative routes often exist, even if they add a transfer.
Costs that do not penalise frequent movement: unlimited-travel passes reduce “trip anxiety” and make multi-stop days (school, errands, appointments) easier to manage.

Amenities (A): the convenience dividend

An amenities score of A tends to show up in the small, repeatable wins: groceries that do not require a car, neighbourhood pharmacies and clinics, sports centres, libraries, playgrounds, and a density of cafés and everyday services that makes errands efficient. Madrid’s size helps here: many districts function like self-contained towns, with their own commercial streets and civic infrastructure.

The city’s convenience is also administrative and digital: many routine tasks (appointments, permits, information) are structured for a high-throughput urban population. That does not eliminate bureaucracy, but it often reduces the number of “in-person only” bottlenecks that can make city life feel brittle.

Healthcare (B+): strong baseline access, with pressure points

Spain’s public healthcare model provides a solid foundation for urban residents, and Madrid benefits from being a capital region with major hospitals and specialised services. A B+ health score is consistent with a system that is broadly accessible, but where lived experience can vary depending on primary-care capacity, waiting times in certain specialties, and the compounding effects of environment—especially heat and noise.

Environmental health is not abstract here. The city publishes annual air-quality summaries, including pollutant exceedances and compliance signals. In its 2024 summary, Madrid reports that the annual limit value for PM2.5 (25 μg/m³) was not exceeded at any station across the long 2010–2024 period, and that ozone information-threshold exceedances occurred on a limited number of days, with no ozone alert-threshold events recorded in 2024.

At street level, however, exposure can still concentrate near heavy-traffic corridors. Regional reporting cited annual NO2 averages around the low 30s μg/m³ at Plaza Elíptica in 2024—below the current EU legal limit of 40 μg/m³, but above stricter guideline trajectories discussed for the coming decade.

Childcare and education (A+): depth of options, not one single “perfect path”

Madrid’s A+ score for childcare and education is credible if interpreted as breadth and resilience rather than universal ease. The city-region offers multiple schooling models (public, publicly funded private, private, and international options), plus a large higher-education footprint. That diversity tends to matter more than any single metric because it gives families “second-best choices” that are still acceptable—critical in a large city where catchment areas and demand can change.

In daily life, education strength often shows up as:

Choice density: multiple schools within realistic commute ranges, reducing the risk that a single oversubscribed option determines housing decisions.
Transit-enabled routines: the ability to combine school runs with public-transport commuting, rather than building life around car dependency.
Extracurricular infrastructure: municipal sports facilities, cultural centres, and libraries that make after-school life workable without long cross-city trips.

Urban planning, land use, and development: a city managing growth by “big moves”

Madrid’s urban form reflects decades of layered planning: a dense, mixed-use centre; strong radial corridors; ring-road infrastructure; and outer districts where land zoning has historically supported larger-scale residential development.

Recent strategy leans toward large, complex interventions—redevelopments and expansions that add housing, offices, and green space at scale. The Madrid Nuevo Norte plan illustrates this approach, with thousands of homes and substantial planned public realm and facilities described in municipal reporting.

This planning posture aligns with a “NIMBY B” score: the city can deliver major projects, but the pathway is negotiated and time-consuming, and the pace may not fully offset demand shocks in the near term.

Safety: generally stable, with big-city patterning

Madrid’s safety profile is typically described as “urban but manageable.” Official regional reporting for 2024 cited a criminality rate of 57.1 offences per 1,000 inhabitants in the Community of Madrid, down versus the prior year, alongside improving or mixed trends by category.

As in most large cities, the lived experience of safety is unevenly distributed by place and time. Transport hubs, nightlife-heavy blocks, and high-footfall tourist areas tend to concentrate petty theft risk. Residential streets away from major corridors often feel substantially calmer.

Noise (C): the most “neighbourhood-dependent” variable in the whole package

If there is a single category where Madrid’s experience swings sharply by micro-location, it is noise. The city’s own acoustic planning documents identify road traffic as the primary source of environmental noise, with additional pressure from nightlife clusters and major infrastructure.

Critically, the municipal review of its noise action plan quantifies exposure: in the MER 2016 analysis, the share of the population exposed above legal acoustic objectives was reported at about 2.2% for daytime levels above 65 dBA (Ld), 1.6% for evening above 65 dBA (Le), and 9.3% for night above 55 dBA (Ln), with a notable reduction in night exposure versus the prior map cycle.

Those percentages sound small until they are translated into lived reality: in a city of roughly 3.33 million, even single-digit exposure shares represent a very large number of people whose sleep quality can be systematically affected.

Noise is also where “good citywide policy” does not always protect the individual apartment. A quiet interior courtyard can make a central location feel serene; a unit facing a fast corridor can make the same neighbourhood feel punishing. In practical housing searches, noise is often the decisive variable that separates “looks great on paper” from “works every weekday night.”

Culture and leisure (B+): deep supply, but participation varies by time and budget

Madrid’s cultural life is dense and layered: major museums and theatres, yes, but also neighbourhood festivals, smaller venues, community programming, and a public realm designed for social life—plazas, parks, and late operating hours. A B+ score reads as realistic: the supply is strong, but the ability to participate can be constrained by housing cost, commute burdens from outer districts, and the time pressures of big-city routines.

The most distinctive feature is not a single attraction; it is how culture is distributed through ordinary evenings—short walks to a local bar, a small venue, a civic centre event, or a park that stays active beyond daylight hours.

Development trends worth watching

Affordability pressure versus supply delivery: market indicators show rapid price growth; large developments may help, but their timelines are measured in years, not quarters.
Transport policy as a cost-of-living lever: the extension of discounted public-transport pricing through 2026 is a material household-budget factor, especially for multi-person families and frequent commuters.
Environmental regulation tightening: air-quality reporting and low-emission policy direction suggest continued emphasis on traffic-related pollutants and the externalities of car dominance in the core.
Noise mitigation as quality-of-life infrastructure: Madrid’s own monitoring and planning framework shows that acoustic quality is being treated as a policy domain, not a minor nuisance—relevant for both health and housing desirability.

Who the city suits (and who may struggle)

Madrid tends to suit

Students and early-career professionals who value mobility, social infrastructure, and “dense opportunity,” and who can accept smaller housing footprints.
Families who prioritise schooling options and can optimise neighbourhood choice around transit plus calmer streets.
Newcomers who prefer a city where daily life can run without a car and where routines can be built around an integrated transport pass system.
Seniors who benefit from proximity to services, walkable streets, and public transport—provided housing is chosen with noise and stairs/elevator access in mind.

Madrid can be harder for

Households seeking large homes in central areas without a high budget, given current rent and purchase dynamics.
Light sleepers who end up on major traffic corridors or in nightlife-adjacent zones; noise exposure remains a meaningful constraint.
Car-dependent routines: driving can work, but parking management, congestion, and environmental policy direction tend to reward public transport and local living patterns over cross-city car commuting.