A new review by the Finance Ministry’s economics division challenges a common assumption about Israeli salaries and housing. Despite frequent claims that doctors leave for tech because of the pay gap, the ministry says doctors across Israel are buying more expensive homes than high-tech workers, and are also directing a larger share of their wealth into real estate.
The findings were presented by Galit Ben Naim in a post this week tied to the ministry’s monthly housing review, titled “Is there a doctor in the room?” The backdrop is a still-frozen housing market. In April, only 1,366 new apartments were sold on the open market, one of the lowest April totals since the early 2000s, Ben Naim said. She noted that April included both the war and Passover, but said their overlap does not change the picture of weak sales.
One striking example was Tel Aviv, where high-tech workers bought just nine second-hand apartments in April, even though about 84,000 people in the city are employed in the sector, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. Over the past two years, Tel Aviv has accounted for about 10% of all high-tech purchases, followed by Haifa with nearly 7%. The average price of a home bought by a tech employee was about NIS 4.6 million in Tel Aviv and about NIS 2.1 million in Haifa. Jerusalem ranked only 12th, with about 2% of tech purchases, despite having a similar number of tech jobs as Haifa.
Ben Naim said the housing data also overturns the idea that tech workers are outbidding doctors. “No city was found where the tech workers ‘beat’ the doctors on the price of the homes purchased,” she wrote, adding that the median-price comparison shows the same result. Doctors buying homes were slightly older, with a median age of 45 versus 38 for tech workers, but Ben Naim said the gap is not large enough to explain the difference entirely. She wrote that when a doctor buys a home at 45, they likely have less equity than a tech worker, but also a longer earning horizon and greater job security.
The main behavioral difference, according to the data, is investment appetite. Twenty-two percent of doctors’ purchases were for investment, compared with 13% among high-tech workers. Ben Naim said this may reflect different financial habits and different views of property as a long-term savings tool. Builders quoted in the article suggested the pattern may reflect a broader shift, with tech workers becoming more cautious amid layoffs, while doctors, whose jobs are not replaceable by artificial intelligence, are emerging as the new real-estate investors. Ben Naim also said Israel has recently seen a healthy rise in the number of people receiving medical licenses, but not yet enough to meaningfully affect housing demand. She concluded that if the increase helps shorten public healthcare waiting lines, that would be enough.
