Should we buy a house, or wait?
Some highly pessimistic things worth noting to go alongside all the stability and tax break upside that homes generally provide: Negative equity is no joke and basically the only thing that bankrupts the middle classes consistently en masse. The UK is at the end of a huge housing bull run where rents are extremely cheap relative to buying (often in the 1% range within the M25), Brexit is looming and interest rates could well sky rocket with inflation. Borrowing ~500k to buy a highly illiquid asset you might have to fire sale in case of emergency/job loss etc for 300k in a few years when lots of (relatively) cheap rental housing is available to rent risk free, could be argued to be a highly lopsided and dangerous bet vs the alternatives. Locking in 'preferential' mortgage rates can be a huge trap: low interest rates generally increase asset values. If/when they rise, assets fall in value as the demand shrinks, making you highly exposed to huge losses if you need to sell before it is paid off. In the case of housing this can be exceptionally vicious as the liquidity dramatically dries up during falls, meaning fire sales become much more severe than they are for more liquid assets like stock.  Weirdly and unlike most products, people tend to buy the very best house they can get leverage for, rather than work out what they need/want and finding the best value equivalent. If a bank will lend you £20 a day to buy lunch, and you can just afford to pay it, do you hunt out the very best £20 lunch you can every day, or do you make some solid compromises so you can save money for other things etc? You seem to be hunting very close to the absolute peak amount you can spend on these numbers. Related to above, at that level of mortgage/salary you have very little margin for error if either of you lose jobs etc.  Houses are much more expensive to maintain/trade than most people think. You spend ~2-5% every time you buy and sell, and you can easily spend 2-20k+ a year depending what happens just keeping the thing watertight, paid for, liveable and staying up. You need to factor this in and be pessimistic when you do.  Most people don't factor in these costs to the apparent 'index' rise in house values and what they expect to sell for in x years. In reality no buy and hold investor can ever realise even close to the quoted house price returns as they are basically stocks you have to pay 5% each time you buy or sell and then 1-20% percent a year to own - they have to rise dramatically over time for you to even break even after all the costs.  In general you should buy homes to make memories, not money, and to buy them at prices that don't cause you sleepless nights in case of disasters.