A typical home in Bow costs about £457,000, and in most cases that buys a flat. Flats make up most of the sales and go for a little over £420,000. The terraced houses cost well over twice that. Prices have dropped sharply over the past year. Bow is cheap for a house in inner London only if you're happy for the house to be a flat.
The Land Registry recorded 410 sales in Bow in the year to the end of May 2026, at a median price of about £457,000. Flats made up 345 of those sales at a typical £426,000. The other common type was the terraced house: 61 sold, at about £870,000. With so few of them, terraced houses have their own small market in Bow, with their own price.
The direction of travel is down, and not by a little. The official house price index for the area put the average price at about £444,000 in May 2026, 15% lower than a year earlier, and flats on their own were down by the same 15%. That index measures what has already happened and says nothing about next year. Even so, a first-time buyer now pays less for a flat than whoever bought the same flat twelve months ago.
Council tax in Bow is gentler than the prices suggest. Band C is the most common band, and about 19% of homes are in Bands A or B. A Band D home in Tower Hamlets pays about £1,840 a year, so the bill on a typical Band C flat is lower than that.
Renting comes in close to a mortgage on a flat. Across Tower Hamlets, the Office for National Statistics puts the typical private rent at about £2,410 a month as of April 2026, up about 2% on a year earlier. This is the borough average from its rental index, not a median of advertised listings. Broken down by size, the borough-wide figure is about £1,960 for a one-bedroom home, £2,380 for two bedrooms, £2,700 for three and £3,330 for four or more. There is no published figure for studios or single rooms.
Whether Bow is affordable depends a lot on which number you read. The Office for National Statistics models average household income across the area at about £67,700 a year gross, for the financial year to March 2023. After tax that comes down to about £50,300. Those figures are three years old. A flat at Bow's typical price is within reach on two good incomes and a solid deposit, and a stretch on one. The terraced houses are for people whose deposit came from selling a previous home.
On the sales that can be matched to an energy certificate, about 26% of last year's total, the median price was around £7,900 per square metre, and the typical home behind that figure had a floor area of about 94 square metres. Bow's flats are bigger than you might expect. If you're comparing two flats, the price per square metre on each sales record is the fairer test, because the asking price alone doesn't tell you which one gives you more room.
At the 2021 Census, about 30% of Bow's homes had one bedroom, 39% had two, 23% had three and 9% had four or more. The two-bedroom flat is the standard Bow home. A family that needs a fourth bedroom is shopping in a market where only about one home in eleven has one.
For a London buyer, Bow's prices are middling: fair for a flat and steep for anything with stairs inside it. Over the past year they have moved in the buyer's favour.