A typical home in Bourton-on-the-Water sells for about £440,000, which is a Cotswolds price for a Cotswolds postcard. Detached houses cost well over half a million. Terraces and semis come in a long way below that. Flats sell so rarely they barely register. The middle figure is real enough, though very few of the houses on sale are actually priced near it.
The Land Registry recorded 42 sales in the year to May 2026, at a typical price of about £440,000. Split by type, the 19 detached houses went for about £585,000, the 12 semis for about £369,000, the eight terraces for about £333,000, and the three flats for about £165,000. Most of the gap between the top and bottom of that list is limestone: detached houses in the yellow Cotswold stone, with mullioned windows and stone hoods over the doors, cost close to four times what the flats do.
The official house price index for this area was up 3.9% over the twelve months to May 2026, and flats were up just 0.7%. Both are small moves. The flat figure is the market barely moving at all, and with three flat sales here in a year, the local version of that market is hardly there to move.
Council tax is mostly Band C, with about 18% of homes in Bands A and B, and a Band D bill runs to about £2,392 a year. In a village where most of the stock is houses, the cheap bands belong to a short list of properties that rarely come up for sale.
Across Cotswold District, typical private rent is about £1,260 a month, based on the April 2026 index. That figure is a mean from the Office for National Statistics' rent index, worked out for the whole district, and it says nothing about Bourton's own streets. By size, the district averages run to about £880 for one bedroom, £1,110 for two, £1,350 for three and £2,060 for four or more. A one-bed at the district rate assumes there is a one-bed to rent, and the bedroom count further down makes that a hopeful assumption.
Modelled gross household income here was about £60,000 for the financial year to March 2023. Gross means before tax and everything else comes off, and it is also three years old. At about £440,000 for a typical sale, a household on that income would need serious savings or plenty of equity from a previous house. The terraces and semis are where local wages and local prices come closest to each other.
The typical price per square metre is about £4,480, behind a typical floor area of 83 square metres. That figure comes from the sales the Land Registry could match to an energy certificate's floor area, which covers about 76% of them, so the rest are left out. Eighty-three square metres is a modest family house, and the price per square metre is the toll for living inside the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The 2021 Census puts about 10% of homes at one bedroom, 24% at two, 42% at three and 24% at four or more. Three bedrooms is the default, and a four-bed is as common as a two-bed. With about 30% of postcodes flagged high on at least one flood indicator, it is worth getting a buildings insurance quote on the exact address at the same time as the mortgage quote. Two houses with the same three bedrooms can come with very different premiums depending on which side of the Windrush they are on.
Houses here cost a little more than their size would justify, and a lot more than the local income comfortably carries. They are not out of reach, just a stretch on local money.