You need to take into consideration why you want to own instead of rent. Is it worth paying (much) more now and in the medium term in order to avoid having to rent later in life? Do you think prices will continue to rise, and so you will eventually be able to sell the apartment for enough to (mostly) offset what you paid until then? These kinds of questions rarely have a clear-cut answer.

Here's a commonly referenced calculator provided by the New York Times, which can be helpful in terms of making sure you consider a broad array of financial considerations: nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html [it's a little US-centric, but largely applicable worldwide].

Have you compared the prices in different areas?  (I don't know about Austria, but UK house prices vary widely between regions of the country, urban/suburban/rural areas, and more/less desirable localities.)  In pre-Covid times, you'd usually trade off a cheaper house against a longer (and more expensive) commute — but the greater availability of working from home is shifting that balance for some people.

You may want to edit your question to include a wild estimate on how long you plan on staying put. Wild answer: 3 years or less? Not worth the hassle. More than 3 years? See answers. Oh, I know someone who was helping his son & wife to purchase a house, and he asked the son how stable the marriage was. Son said sold, but 3 years later there was a divorcee!

@gidds In Austria, C19 & the lockdowns have made even the most remote regions expensive too, unfortunately. Prices are now as ridiculously high as near the cities. Shame because I could have worked remotely quite often as a programmer.

@Mark Stewart We plan to leave our town in the next 6-12 months as our renting contract is going to end.

Do you actually mean price? Because price point is something completelly different (despite the fact that people mix them up often for some reason).

Wow! Nice to live somewhere where real estate is so cheap.

@DaleM How is a 400,000 EUR house cheap if median monthly income after taxes is 2,200 EUR? You know that people still need to pay for food, children, mobility and stuff?

You need to compare the rent on the home/apt you will be in next year with the cost of buying, not your current (insufficient) place.

Is 600 EUR really considered high rent? Even 1 bedroom apartments in my area (Boston area, USA) tend to start at almost double that. And even when I lived in a much less expensive area that remained the case....

@Orsinus: Without knowing which town you live in, and what you define as small, 600 EUR (cold) seems to be on the cheaper side for an apartment appropriate for a couple living together, even in Austria. As a rule of thumb, spending 1/3 of your net income on housing is OK. If you are looking for a place for a family, you might take your and your wife's salary together as reference. Buying is still expensive though, I'll give you that.

"How does a median income like that still allow homes to become this ridiculously expensive?" — I'm going to bet your landlord has somewhat above the median income.

"How does a median income like that still allow homes to become this ridiculously expensive?" Do people outside your region buy homes there e.g. vacation homes or foreign owners? Another possibility is speculation.

What's the current cost to rent in the city you're moving to? The amount you're currently paying in rent is irrelevant if you're moving.

@pat3d3r We currently live in Graz and rent a 50 m² apartement in a high rise apartement building. For my standards, that is not a tiny apartement, but still a small one. The 600 EUR include nothing else except the rent, everything else like heating, operating costs, power and so on are NOT included. You can't tell me that 12 EUR/m² are cheap while median income after taxes monthly is EUR 2,200 (calculated down to 12x a year not 14x a year you usually get in Austria)?

@PaulD.Waite and don't forget that asset prices are inversely proportional to interest rates! And all the money that was printed (correctly) to deal with COVID to let people pay their rent, of course also went immediately to landlords and accumulated there, where they can bid higher on properties...

@Orsinus: I'm from Graz too, and your appartment seems average considering the price-size-combination. Out of interest, since you are looking for a place for two people, why do you compare it with personal median income and not household median income?

@user253751 and not even particularly to deal with Covid — at least in the UK, we’ve had about 12 years of historically super-low interest rates.

@PaulD.Waite everyone has, though they were starting to go up before COVID. I'm just pre-emptively pointing out that bridging the gap was the correct response to COVID, except nobody expected the gap would last so long.

@user253751: "they were starting to go up before COVID" — a little bit, if I remember correctly, but still historically really low.

This might be a language barrier thing but what is the difference between buying an apartment or a house? Typically you rent an apartment; if you bought it then you essentially bought a house, no?

@MonkeyZeus I am sorry I thought that apartement is a flat within a house, a house is a whole house. Obviously I am not a native english speaker.

@MonkeyZeus an apartment is a smaller rented unit within a building, buying a house involves buying the whole building + the land it sits on. Technically if you buy the apartment it's a condominium (apartment buildings are built for a company to own and rent out all units, condo buildings for the company to sell the units), but it's not terribly uncommon to still call it an apartment since the distinction is a legal one rather than a physical one

@llama Yes, OP has clarified that it is in fact just a difference in language. I'm not saying one is more right than the other as long as you're understood in your locale. An apartment is rented, a condo/flat can be bought or rented, an apartment/condo building/complex is bought, and a house can be rented or bought. Just figured I would provide these American expressions for OP since the majority of the audience is American on this site.