THE AVERAGE woman living in Oxfordshire cannot afford to live alone because rent is too high for their wages, new figures have revealed.

Housing charities define a home as unaffordable if the rent takes up 30 per cent or more of a household's earnings.

The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom property in Oxfordshire was £825 in 2018-19, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.

The median is a measure used to exclude extreme values which could skew the average.

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Earnings figures, also from ONS, show that women in the area – including both full and part-time workers – earned a median salary of £1,774 per month before tax in 2019.

That means that the typical woman would have to fork out 46 per cent of her salary to be able to afford to live alone.

In comparison, local men earn an average of £2,894 per month, so would only have to give up 29 per cent of their salary for the same property.

Across England, women would have to pay 38 per cent of their salary on average to live alone, compared to 24 per cent for men.

In Oxfordshire, average rents have risen by 31 per cent over the last eight years.

In comparison, average salaries only increased by 16 per cent in the same period.