Cork county has highest number of vacant homes in Ireland

Cork County has the highest number of homes lying vacant across any local authority in the country, the latest figures have shown, with over 8,500 empty homes across Cork as a whole.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) said an estimated 70,149 homes in Ireland are lying vacant, according to the latest information, with Cork having almost one in every eight vacant dwellings across the country.

In Cork county alone, there are 6,632 unoccupied properties as well as 1,888 in the city, the CSO confirmed.

The high vacancy rate comes at a time when thousands of people are searching for homes and the numbers stuck in emergency accommodation are at all-time high.

There have calls for local authorities to have expanded teams to deal with the large number of applications for vacant home grants in both rural and urban areas.

“The estimated vacancy rate in Ireland for dwellings based on metered electricity consumption was 3.2% in Q4 2024,” CSO statistician Steven Conroy said.

While some progress has been made to reduce the number of vacant homes, an almost equal number are becoming vacant at the same time. 

In total, 29,268 homes were brought of out of vacancy in 2024, but a further 27,163 homes became idle.

Government grants are available for those wishing to renovate vacant or derelict properties to bring them back into use, up to a maximum of €70,000.

To the end of 2025, over 16,000 applications had been made across the country since the grant’s introduction in July 2022. 

Over 4,500 such grants have been paid, with €246 million in funding issued to property owners.

It recently emerged that Cork County Council has had to draft in extra staff to help deal with the volume of applications.

As of November, 870 applications had been approved but they are not paid out until the works are completed and signed off by county council staff.

Council officials reported to a meeting of the local authority’s Northern Division that the scheme has had such an uptake, it has reassigned resources from other departments to "expedite the processing of applications and to clear a processing backlog".

And, last week, it emerged three family homes in Glanmire have been vacant for two decades, with neither Cork City Council nor Cork County Council taking responsibility for them.