House price inflation has been so extreme in recent years that had wages kept pace, many of us would be earning tens of thousands of pounds more each year.
In the most expensive regions the house price-earnings gap crosses the £100,000 barrier.
In the borough of Westminster in London, for instance, the average annual household's earnings would have to be £158,000 higher today than is actually the case, had earnings risen in line with house prices in the area.
The calculations, undertaken by housing charity Shelter, are based on official, regional house prices and earnings data taken from 1997. These are then compared with equivalent data from 2012.
Shelter has then run the comparisons for both single-earner households and couples with and without children. The Westminster figure, above, relates to a couple with children.
Nationally, a couple's earnings would be £44,000 higher today than is the case, had they risen at the same pace as house prices.
In a total ranking of all regions, the "affordability gap" has widened most in London's boroughs, as this table shows:
But the research finds no single region across the country where earnings have matched house price inflation, leading Shelter to conclude that property has become more unaffordable in every postcode. It warns the current pick-up in housing transactions, coupled with rising prices, threatens to make this even worse.
"As house prices have risen at a higher rate in London and the South East, the gap between actual earnings and housing-inflated earnings is larger in these areas. There are also high house prices in the South West with pockets of extremely high house prices – relative to wages – in the North."
Shelter added: "Worryingly, there is not a single area in the whole country where wage and house price inflation have remained aligned. Burnley has the smallest gap, but here £10,000 would still need to be added onto the average salary to put it in line with the rise in house prices."
The table, below, relates to the gap as measured in areas (such as the North East) where house prices have not risen as sharply during the period examined.
For example a single earner in Cleveland, whose annual wages average £19,568 in 2012, would be earning more than twice that figure today (£43,849) had his wage grown in line with Cleveland and Redcar's house prices.
This latest work from Shelter is part of its ongoing campaign to get more affordable homes built. The charity is not a fan of the Government's lending initiatives - such as Help to Buy - which it says merely "inflate prices by increasing demand for an already limited number of homes."
Cambell Robb, chief executive, said: "When you’d need to more than double your salary just to keep up with rising house prices, it is no surprise that homeownership is slipping further out of reach for a generation.
"The reality is that successive governments have failed to build the affordable homes that this country needs, and the shortage has reached crisis point. The only solution is to build more affordable homes."
Shelter has an online calculator where you can check what the average earnings in any area would be had they kept up with house price rises since 1997.