How this site is built

The price data

On 16 September 2026 we collected 18,058 apartment sale listings covering all 136 Sofia neighbourhoods from imot.bg, Bulgaria's largest property portal, across six size categories (one-room through five-plus rooms, and maisonettes). For each listing we recorded the asking price, floor area, floor and building height, construction year or completion status, construction material, heating type and whether the seller was a private owner or an agency.

Cleaning

We removed listings with no stated area, areas below 18 m² or above 500 m², and implied prices below €350/m² or above €12,000/m² — filters that eliminate garage listings, mis-keyed prices and commercial premises advertised as flats. Duplicates across pagination were removed on a price/area/description key. Prices quoted in leva were converted at the fixed rate of 1.95583 BGN to the euro.

Statistics

We report medians, not averages, together with the 25th and 75th percentiles, because a handful of penthouses would otherwise distort every neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods with fewer than eight listings are flagged on their page and excluded from the citywide ranking. The resulting Sofia median is €2,538 per square metre, with a median flat price of €238,000 at 95 m².

The most important caveat

These are asking prices. Bulgaria has no public register of achieved sale prices, so no site can honestly publish transaction values for a neighbourhood. In practice, agreed prices in Sofia settle around 3–8% below the advertised figure, more on properties that have been listed for months. Treat every figure here as the top of a negotiation, not as a valuation.

The amenity data

Schools, kindergartens, supermarkets, pharmacies, parks, playgrounds, sports facilities, clinics, restaurants, bus stops, tram stops and metro stations are counted from OpenStreetMap, extracted on the same date. We took the administrative boundary of each neighbourhood where one exists in OSM (91 of the 136) and assigned every mapped facility inside it to that neighbourhood; for the remainder we used the neighbourhood centre point and a 750 m radius. Distances to metro stations and to the city centre are straight-line distances from the neighbourhood centroid to Sveta Nedelya Square.

OpenStreetMap is volunteer-maintained and its coverage of Sofia is good but not perfect — small courtyard playgrounds and single-room shops are under-recorded. Counts should be read as a reliable comparison between neighbourhoods rather than as an exhaustive census of any one of them.

The scorecards

Each neighbourhood page carries eight scores out of ten — value for money, public transport, schools and childcare, everyday shopping, green space and sport, quiet and residential feel, new-build supply, and choice and liquidity. These are our own editorial assessments, computed from the data published on the same page using fixed formulas: amenity counts per square kilometre, metro distance, the price gap to the city median, and the size of the local market. They are not user reviews, and we do not collect or publish user ratings. Where a score is low, the reason is stated next to it.

Who we are, and how we are paid

Apartment in Sofia is an independent, English-language research site. We are not an estate agency, we do not hold listings, and no developer pays for placement or for a better score. If you send us a brief through the enquiry form, we may put you in touch with local brokers and may be paid a referral fee by them — that never changes what the data pages say, and it never costs you anything.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, tell us: hello@apartmentinsofia.com. Neighbourhood boundaries in particular are contested in Sofia, and we would rather fix an assignment than defend it.