Previously, in Part 2: weddings fell after every shock and never returned to their 2014 level. When the future is unclear, waiting is a sensible choice. Read Part 2
Main findings
- Almost 1 in 3 young Georgians who want a job cannot find one: 29.9% in 2024.
- A new flat in Tbilisi costs 7.7 years of the average gross salary, and with a mortgage in lari much more.
- The country's direction on Europe, written into the Constitution, now looks uncertain.
Part 2 showed that waiting is a sensible answer to an unclear future. For a young couple, three things decide how clear the future looks: a job, a home, and the direction of the country.
Start with jobs. In 2024, 29.9% of young Georgians who were looking for work could not find it, almost twice the EU rate, and unemployment at all ages was twice the EU level too. Having a job does not always mean a steady income either: more than 4 in 10 working Georgians are self-employed or help in a family business, usually without a contract or a regular wage, against 1 in 10 in the EU. Every one of these numbers has improved since 2014, and the share of young people neither working nor studying has halved. However, all of them remain well above the EU level.
Fewer jobs, and fewer steady ones: Georgia's labour market against the EU, 2024
A job is the first step. The second is a place to live. For a young couple, a home of their own is usually what has to come before a wedding and a first child, and that step has become very expensive.
Housing
Can young Georgians afford a first home?
Figure 1.
A first flat costs almost eight years of the average gross salary, before spending a single lari on anything else.
A new 60 m² flat in Tbilisi cost about $ in January 2026. The average gross salary was 2,389 lari, about $900 a month. Someone on that salary who saved every lari would need years to pay for it. This is the price-to-income ratio, the simplest test of whether homes are affordable, and it leaves out interest.
The top of the market shows how far prices have moved. In September 2026, Trump Tower Tbilisi was launched: a luxury complex that will be Georgia's tallest building, with prices from about $ per m², times the city average. One square metre there costs about months of the average salary, and a 60 m² flat about years. The developer expects most buyers to come from abroad, and prices for some apartments to reach $15,000 per m² as construction goes on. It is a luxury project for foreign buyers; however, even an ordinary new flat costs almost eight years of salary.
Figure 2.
Total paid, lari. 20% paid upfront, the rest borrowed at % a year.
Few people pay in cash. With a mortgage in lari, a couple would first pay 20% upfront, lari, which is about months of the average gross salary. To repay the rest in years, they would need lari a month, more than a whole average salary of lari. If they can put aside lari a month, % of two average salaries, the loan takes years, and the interest alone, lari, costs more than the flat. Without the money upfront, lari a month would not even cover the interest.
Two things make it harder for the young. Many of them earn less than the average salary. And flats are priced in dollars while salaries are paid in lari, so when the lari falls, as it did in 2015, a flat becomes more expensive overnight. For a decision as hard to undo as a mortgage, that is one more reason to wait.
Photo: construction in Saburtalo, Tbilisi, 2021. Jelger Groeneveld, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Then there is politics. In October 2024 the ruling party won an election that the opposition and the European Parliament say was not free and fair. On 28 November 2024 the government put its plans to open EU accession talks on hold until 2028, and protests continued through 2025. In 2025 parliament passed a "foreign agents" law and stricter rules on protests and the media. In March 2026 the EU suspended visa-free travel for diplomatic, service and official passports and said it could extend this to all Georgian citizens.
You do not need to take sides to see what this does to a 25-year-old planning her life. Most Georgians want their country in the EU, a choice so fundamental that it is written directly into the supreme law of the state:
Article 78 · Integration into European and Euro-Atlantic structures
“The constitutional bodies shall take all measures within the scope of their competences to ensure the full integration of Georgia into the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
Constitution of Georgia · Constitutional Law No 1324 of 13 October 2017 and No 2071 of 23 March 2018
Yet that path now looks uncertain. Uncertainty like this is exactly what makes waiting look sensible. In short, people do not stop wanting families when times are hard. They stop committing to them when the future is hard to read.