Every month, Malta's National Statistics Office counts how many homes changed hands. The count is dry, it comes with a page of methodological footnotes, and most people who talk about the Maltese property market have never opened it. That is a pity, because it answers the question every buyer, seller and landlord on the island is asking in 2026: is the market still running hot, or has it started to cool?
The most recent answer came on 11 August, when NSO published Residential Property Transactions: July 2026 (news release 142/2026). Read together with the price index from early July and the building permit figures from 20 August, it gives a clear picture. Fewer deeds, higher values. Here is what the numbers say, and what they do not say.
The July Headline: A Quieter Month, a Bigger Bill
In July 2026 NSO recorded just over 1,200 final deeds of sale for residential property. That is about 5% fewer than in July 2025, which had been an unusually busy month. On its own, that sounds like a slowdown.
Now look at the money. The same deeds were worth roughly €420 million, around 4% more than a year earlier. Fewer contracts, more euros. Divide one by the other and the average deed in July was worth about €345,000, against roughly €317,000 in July 2025.
The promise of sale agreements, the konvenji that come before the final deed, tell the same story. NSO counted 1,147 of them in July, down 6.5% on the year. Their value was €483.3 million, up 9.7%. Buyers are signing fewer agreements, and each one is bigger.
One detail matters for anyone reading these figures as a household buyer. Individual buyers, as opposed to companies, accounted for about nine in ten final deeds in July, but only about three quarters of the total value. Company deeds are fewer, but larger on average. When you hear that "the average price" rose, part of that is the mix of who is buying.
The Year So Far: Not a Slowdown
A single month can mislead. The picture from January to July is different from the July headline.
Across the first seven months of 2026, NSO's tables show a little over 8,000 final deeds, almost 5% more than the roughly 7,670 in the same period of 2025. Every month from January to June came in above its 2025 equivalent, except May. Only July dipped, and only against a strong comparison.
The value side is more striking. Final deeds registered between January and July were worth about €2.6 billion, around 15% more than a year earlier. The first quarter alone came in at well over €1.1 billion, against about €919 million in the first quarter of 2025.
For context, the full year 2025 closed with just over 13,300 final deeds worth just over €4 billion, according to the same NSO table. If August to December 2026 merely match the same months of 2025, this year will pass that value comfortably. The volume is growing slowly. The value is growing fast.
The promise of sale agreements, which point to where the final deeds will go over the coming months, rose about 3% in number and about 17% in value between January and July. That is the pipeline. It does not suggest a market that is about to stall.
Prices: The Index That Adjusts for What Is Being Sold
Average values per deed are a blunt instrument. A deed can cover several properties, and a month with more villas and fewer garages will show a higher average even if no individual price moved. That is why NSO publishes a separate price index.
The Residential Property Price Index for the first quarter of 2026, released on 2 July, stood at 104.19. That is 6.7% higher than a year earlier and 1.8% higher than in the last quarter of 2025. Apartments rose 6.9% on the year, maisonettes 5.3%.
The index uses data from the tax authority and, since the first quarter of 2023, adjusts for the characteristics of the homes sold, so a shift towards bigger or better properties does not show up as inflation. It is the closest thing Malta has to an answer to the question "how much more does the same home cost than last year?" The answer at the start of 2026 was: noticeably more, but not wildly more.
The index is quarterly. The second-quarter figure had not been published by early September, so the first quarter is the latest reading available.
What Is Actually Being Sold
The July release also counts the individual properties inside the deeds. In July 2026, the final deeds covered about 1,330 properties. About a third were apartments. About a quarter were garages.
That second number surprises people who are new to Malta. Garages count as separate properties, a single deed can include more than one property, and garages show up in NSO's count in large numbers. When someone quotes you "over 1,300 properties sold in July", remember that hundreds of them were places to park a car.
The rest of the July count was made up of houses (including villas, terraced houses and farmhouses), maisonettes, plots of land, penthouses and a small group of others such as airspace and gardens. Penthouses were the smallest of the named categories.
Where the Deeds Were Signed
NSO also breaks the deeds down by locality. In July 2026, San Pawl il-Baħar recorded the most final deeds, followed by Marsaskala and Mosta. For promise of sale agreements, San Pawl il-Baħar again led, followed by Birkirkara and Mosta.
None of that is new. San Pawl il-Baħar is consistently among the busiest localities in NSO's monthly series, and it is where volume happens. The prestige addresses around Sliema, St Julian's and Valletta appear much lower down in the count, because there are simply fewer units changing hands there. If you are trying to understand which areas suit you rather than which areas are busy, the honest guide to where to live in Malta is a better starting point than any transaction table.
The Supply Side: More Homes on the Way
The third release worth reading is Residential Building Permits: Q2/2026, published on 20 August. In the second quarter of 2026, Malta approved 539 building permits covering 3,126 new dwellings. The number of permits fell by 9.9% on the year. The number of dwellings in them rose by 3.3%.
In plain terms: fewer, larger projects. The average permit covered 5.8 dwellings. Apartments made up 72.1% of everything approved, followed by penthouses and maisonettes, with only a handful of terraced houses and villas. The locality with the most approved dwellings was, again, San Pawl il-Baħar, with 258.
Gozo moved the other way from Malta. Approved dwellings rose by 4.6% on Malta and fell by 5.1% on Gozo and Comino. If you have been weighing the sister island, the Gozo versus Malta property comparison sets out the trade-offs in more detail.
For anyone worried about overbuilding, the permit numbers are worth keeping in view. A permit is not a finished home. NSO publishes these figures to indicate where construction activity is heading, and they show that Malta is still approving several thousand new units a quarter, overwhelmingly apartments. Whether that feels like progress or like a concrete jungle depends on where you stand, but it does shape what the market will offer.
How to Read These Numbers Without Fooling Yourself
The NSO transaction release is useful, but it has limits that its own footnotes spell out. Five of them matter for anyone making a decision.
Registration is not signing. NSO counts deeds and agreements by the date they were registered with the Malta Tax and Customs Administration, not the date they were signed. That makes the data timely, but it means a month's figure can reflect paperwork timing as much as buying behaviour.
A deed is not a home. One deed can cover several properties, which is why NSO reports the count of properties separately. Average values per deed mix apartments, garages and plots in one number.
Not everything is counted. The release covers only transactions the tax authority classifies as residential and only sales. Commercial property, fields, car spaces, donations and exchanges are left out.
Promises can fall through. A promise of sale agreement is counted once, when it is registered. Some never become final deeds. Extensions are not counted again.
Everything is provisional. NSO states plainly that the data are provisional and subject to revision as the source data are updated. Monthly figures often move slightly when the next release comes out. That is one reason to watch the trend over several months and not a single headline number.
What It Means if You Are Buying in Malta
Three practical conclusions follow from the numbers as they stood at the start of September 2026.
First, there is no sign in the official data of the kind of correction that would make waiting pay off in the short term. Values registered in the first seven months were up by around 15%, and the quality-adjusted price index was up by 6.7% on the year at the start of 2026. A buyer hoping for a bargain autumn is betting against the trend.
Second, the market is not uniform. Volume is concentrated in apartment-heavy localities, most new supply is apartments, and the rising average value per deed is partly a mix effect. Whether a specific property is fairly priced depends on its street, its floor, its finishes and its paperwork, and none of that shows up in a national table. The buyer's guide to Malta property covers the process and the checks that matter.
Third, if you are renting while you decide, the same forces that push sale prices up also bear on rents. Housing is the largest single line in most residents' budgets, and the cost of living breakdown for 2026 puts it in context with everything else.
The honest summary of NSO's latest figures is short. Malta is selling slightly more homes than last year, at clearly higher values, while approving thousands of new apartments a quarter. July was a softer month for volume. It was not a turning point.
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