CAIRNS is one of the least affordable places in Queensland for health, education and emergency service workers trying to buy a home, a report says.

Port Douglas region showed up as even tougher.

Based on wages versus the median house price in regional Queensland, both Cairns, ranked 10th and Port Douglas, ranked fifth, are unaffordable for key government-employed workers in the BankWest study.

The bank classifies a region unaffordable when the median price is more than five times the worker’s annual earnings.

Our nurses fare worst with house prices up to nine times their wages.

State secretary of the Queensland Nurses Union Gay Hawksworth said she was not surprised at the Far Northern result.

"It certainly indicates that nurses are the worst off," she said.

"They (government) wonder why nurses just give up and stay at home."

Ms Hawksworth said apart from nurses needing higher pay, problems in Cairns included hospital locations.

She said to afford a home people had to live a distance from Cairns’ hospitals and with little public transport, high petrol costs were cutting into income.

President of the Queensland Fire Fighters Union Henry Lawrence, whose Cairns members face up to a 7.2 earnings ratio to buy a house, said a profession that traditionally was difficult to get into was struggling to find recruits.

"It makes it more difficult to attract people to those regions where prices and rents are higher," he said.

"Those factors combine to make recruitment difficult, but also to retain people in the job as they can go to mining areas and be paid much higher wages."

Cairns firefighter Darcy McGee, who only recently joined the service, said he was doing it for love not money.

The former roofer said as economic conditions worsened, he was selling his investment property and his wife had put their youngest child in day care and gone back to work.

"I am 36, I have had a decent working life to get a house," he said.

"I can afford to be a firie, but I don’t know how younger blokes who want to buy a home can."

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