The income floor for a 50% debt ratio rises in February 2027

The report works it through with two examples. A borrower on 1,800 lari net currently sits above the floor, so up to 900 lari a month can go to debt; from February 2027 they fall below it and the cap drops to 450. Someone on 2,300 lari is untouched in February, then in September their ceiling falls from 1,150 to 575. Nothing about the apartment changes. The borrowing capacity halves.

The gap between the average wage and the typical wage is the whole point. The report cites Geostat's average nominal wage of 2,389.3 lari for the second quarter of 2026 against a 2024 median of 1,332 lari, a median advertised salary of 1,400 lari on Findjobs.ge, and a PMCG finding that around 42% of employees earned 1,200 lari or less. A threshold set at 2,500 lari therefore sits above most of the workforce, not at its edge.

This is where a buyer should slow down. The report describes developer phased-payment plans as largely unregulated: usually in foreign currency, outside the income caps, often not reported to credit bureaus, and without the effective-interest-rate disclosure banks must give. Some now ask for no deposit at all. A former vice governor of the National Bank quoted in the piece calls them quasi-mortgages. Tightening the bank rule while that channel stays open pushes the thinner borrower towards the less measured product.

The reported mortgage numbers show how much of the market runs on credit: close to 40,000 new mortgages worth 4.1 billion lari in the first eight months of 2026, with the average loan up from about 86,000 to 104,000 lari. If a slice of local buyers loses borrowing capacity in 2027, the cheaper end of the stock is where it shows first. Owners of entry-level flats in outer districts have more than a year of notice to decide whether they would rather sell into the current rules.