Croatia Completed 18,338 New Homes in 2025 as the Average Dwelling Shrank to 90.4 Square Metres

Croatia finished 18,338 new dwellings in 2025, up 10.1% on 2024, yet the average completed home lost 4.6 square metres and total building floor area fell 3.2%.

Croatia completed 18,338 new dwellings during 2025, 10.1% more than the 16,654 finished a year earlier, according to figures the Croatian Bureau of Statistics released on 25 September 2026. The count went up but the space did not: the floor area of all completed buildings fell 3.2% to 3,293,970 square metres, and the average new dwelling measured 90.4 square metres against 95.0 in 2024.

Almost all of it was genuinely new construction. Of the completed dwellings, 95.2% were new builds, 4.1% came from additions or extensions to existing buildings, and 0.7% from converting non-residential space. The country finished 7,484 buildings in total, 85.3% of them residential.

Who is building, and why the homes are smaller

The shrinking average is not spread evenly across builders. Dwellings put up by private individuals averaged 109.2 square metres last year. Those built by other legal persons, the category that covers commercial developers, averaged 70.2 square metres. The two groups are now almost the same size: private individuals completed 9,403 dwellings, other legal persons 8,816. Every apartment the developers add pulls the national average down, which is why a 10.1% rise in units came with a 4.6 square metre fall in average size.

Public authorities completed 119 dwellings in the whole of 2025, roughly one in every 154 new homes. Croatia's new housing supply is, to a rounding error, entirely private.

Zagreb leads, but the Adriatic counties do the volume

The City of Zagreb finished 3,736 dwellings, more than any single county. Behind it came three Adriatic counties: Zadar with 2,829, Split-Dalmatia with 2,532 and Istria with 2,149. Those four areas together account for 11,246 of the national 18,338. Zagreb County added 1,581, Osijek-Baranja 1,000 and Primorje-Gorski Kotar 768.

What was built skews small and urban. Two-room dwellings were the largest group at 5,931 units, followed by three-room at 5,644 and four-room at 3,562; one-room units numbered 1,458. Only 5,933 of the 18,338 dwellings are in buildings with a lift, and only 12,212 have central heating. Just 74 were recorded as holiday dwellings; the other 18,264 were recorded as housing for permanent occupation, which is a low share given how much of the building happened on the coast.

The building data and the price data are telling different stories

More completions have not translated into cooling prices. Our own Croatian market snapshot, taken on 22 September 2026, puts the national average asking price at $4,549.9 per square metre and average asking rent at $17.75 per square metre a month, both from a Croatian property portal's own index for August 2026. That snapshot shows asking prices 14.3% above a year earlier and a bubble-risk score of 70, inside the elevated band. Round-trip transaction costs come to 7.5% of the purchase price, and rental income is taxed at an effective 8.4%.

The two sets of figures measure different things and should not be read against each other directly. The statistics office counts dwellings physically finished during calendar 2025, a backward-looking supply number that reflects permits issued two or three years earlier. The price figures are asking prices in live listings from August 2026. A year in which supply rose 10.1% and asking prices rose 14.3% is not a contradiction; it is what a market looks like when demand is running ahead of a construction pipeline that takes years to respond.

The release carries no price data of its own, and the bureau publishes dwelling prices in a separate statistic, so nothing here revises the price picture. What it does establish is the shape of the supply that arrived: more units, smaller units, built almost entirely by the private sector, and concentrated in the capital and along the coast.

Sources: Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS), Completed Buildings and Dwellings 2025, First Release GRAD-2026-2-1, Zagreb, 25 September 2026 https://podaci.dzs.hr/2026/en/120990; Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS), Zavrsene zgrade i stanovi u 2025., 25 September 2026 https://podaci.dzs.hr/2026/hr/120989

Market data: Croatia