The price of one hectare of arable land in 2021 ranged from a low of €3 661 on average in Croatia to €47 290 on average in tiny Luxembourg, among the nineteen EU Member States for which 2021 data are available. This range is likely to be even wider, as the average price of one hectare of arable land in the Netherlands was €71 225 in 2020.
Latvia comes out with the third-cheapest land among countries surveyed, with a price of €4 331 per hectare, making it slightly cheaper than both Estonia (€4 383) and Lithuania (€4 667).
At the regional level, the highest prices for arable land were in the Spanish Canary Islands (an average €120 477 per hectare). By contrast, the lowest was in the Swedish region of Övre Norrland (an average €1 882).
The price of one hectare of permanent grassland in 2021 ranged from a low of €1 423 on average in Bulgaria to €41 930 on average in Luxembourg, and was as much as €59 065 on average in the Netherlands in 2020. Again, Latvia was at the cheaper end of the scale with a price of €2 752.
In most EU regions for which data are available, buying arable land was more expensive than buying permanent grassland. It was a little over twenty times more expensive on average on the Greek islands of the North Aegean region (arable land: €37 926 and permanent grassland: €1 744) and in the Spanish region of Murcia (arable land: €20 445 and permanent grassland: €982). The Spanish regions of Asturias (€8 096 / €9 536), Madrid (€7 621 / €7 946) and the Lithuanian region of Sostinės (€3 805 /€4 055), stand out as exceptions.
The level of land prices depends on a number of factors; these include national factors (like laws), regional factors (like climate and proximity to networks) and localised productivity factors (such as soil quality, slope or drainage). The market forces of supply and demand, including the influence of foreign ownership rules, can also influence the price of agricultural land. Latvia does have a law linking language ability to farmland purchases where foreigners are concerned, as previously reported by LSM.
