Brighton and Hove is the fifth-worst city in the UK for unaffordable homes, new statistics reveal.

Figures show the cost of a typical home in a UK city is at its most unaffordable level since 2009, as buyers face stretching their wages further to keep up with rising property prices, a report has found.

A city home now costs 6.1 times gross average annual earnings, up from a multiple of 5.8 times average earnings 12 months ago as the housing market recovery has spread across the country, the study by Lloyds Bank found.

It said that affordability in UK cities is now back to the same level as in 2009, although it is still lower than at the peak of the housing boom in 2008, when the average property cost 7.2 times earnings.

Oxford is the UK’s least affordable city, with the average house price standing at £361,469, which is nearly 11 times the local wage.

Winchester, Cambridge, Chichester and Brighton and Hove completed the top five least affordable cities list.

In Winchester and Cambridge, homes cost about ten times local earnings, while in Chichester and Brighton and Hove they cost more than nine times earnings.

Greater London comes not far behind, with a home there costing around 8.75 times average earnings in the capital.

The findings were made as a separate report from property analysts Hometrack found that cities such as Belfast, Leeds, Liverpool and Cardiff all registered a strong growth in house sales in 2014 compared with their average for the previous five years.

Hometrack said that rising sales volumes are an important indication of house prices being poised to push up.

Meanwhile, compared with 2013, cities such as Cambridge, Aberdeen, Oxford and London, which have all already seen a strong increase in house prices as the recovery has taken hold, saw the volume of sales slow down in 2014, Hometrack said.

Andy Hulme, Lloyds Bank mortgages director, said: “House price rises in the past two years have resulted in a deterioration in home affordability in the majority of UK cities, and widening the north/south affordability divide as the market has been strongest in the south.

“The UK’s most successful cities economically have tended to see the strongest property price rises.”