Property price per square meter by city in the Philippines

Why price per square meter matters

A total listing price tells you very little on its own: a ₱3,000,000 studio and a ₱3,000,000 family home are completely different deals. Price per square meter strips out the size of the unit, so you can line up a condo in Makati against a house and lot in Davao on equal footing. It is the single most useful number when you are deciding where to buy or rent, and whether a specific listing is fairly priced for the space it offers.

Buyers use it to set a realistic budget, to shortlist neighbourhoods, and to negotiate: if a unit is asking far above the local median per square meter without a clear reason — a prime floor, a renovation, an unblockable view — that is a question worth raising before you make an offer. Sellers and agents use the same figure to price competitively.

Residential, commercial, condo or house

Use the toggle above the table to switch between residential and commercial space, and the sub-filter to view condos or houses on their own. Residential covers condos, houses, townhouses and apartments; commercial covers retail and commercial units, offices and warehouses. These move on different scales — prime retail or office space in a business district can sit well above the residential median, and a central condo usually reads higher per square meter than a house on the fringe — so comparing within a single view is far more meaningful than mixing them. Bare land is kept out of every view, since lot prices follow their own logic. The highlighted national median row gives you one Philippines-wide reference to measure each city against.

Metro Manila versus the provinces

The biggest divide in Philippine property is between the National Capital Region and everywhere else. Prime business districts such as Makati, Taguig (BGC) and Pasig (Ortigas) sit at the top of the per-square-meter scale, driven by offices, transport and limited land. Move to Cebu, Cavite, Pampanga or the Visayas and Mindanao and your budget stretches much further for the same floor area. The table above lets you compare any two cities side by side, and each city name links to its live listings.

Sale price versus rent: a quick yield check

Showing sale and rent per square meter together is handy for investors. Divide the annual rent per square meter (the monthly figure times twelve) by the sale price per square meter and you get a rough gross rental yield for that city. It is only a back-of-the- envelope guide — it ignores fees, vacancy and taxes — but it quickly shows which markets lean toward capital appreciation and which toward rental income.

How we calculate it

Within each view, for every city we take all active listings that state a floor area — or a lot area where the floor area is missing — divide each price by that area, and report the median value, the middle of the range. The national median row uses the same per-square-meter values across every city in that view. The median ignores the occasional mispriced listing far better than a simple average, so the numbers stay grounded. Sale and rent are calculated separately, and the figures refresh every 24 hours as listings change.

To keep the table meaningful we only quote a residential city once it has at least 10 published listings (6 for the condo and house sub-views, and 5 for commercial, since that inventory is thinner), and for the busiest markets — those with more than 100 active listings — we base the median on listings posted in the last 2 months. That way a large backlog of older prices can't pull a fast-moving city away from where it actually trades today.

Buying or renting from abroad?

If you earn in dollars or euros, the gap between Metro Manila and the provinces is even larger once converted. Turn your budget into a peso figure with the affordability calculator, read our guide to buying from abroad, or jump straight to properties for sale and for rent.