About £355,000 for a typical Bude house, which buys a lot more coast than the same money does further south. Detached homes run to roughly £426,000. Semis and terraces both land near £300,000. Flats sit around £180,000. For a town where the Atlantic is the main amenity, that is a shorter cheque than most people expect to write.
The Land Registry recorded 100 sales in the year to May 2026, which is enough to trust the shape of it rather than just the headline. The median across all of them was about £355,000. Split by type, detached homes came in at roughly £426,000 across 46 sales, semis at about £300,000 across 20, terraces at about £297,000 across 17, and flats at around £180,000 across 17. The interesting line there is the semi and the terrace, which are within a few thousand pounds of each other. Whatever you are paying for in Bude, it is not the number of walls you share.
The published house-price index for the area sat at about £280,000 as of May 2026, up around 4% over the twelve months and down a tenth of a percent over the month, which is a rounding error wearing a minus sign. Flats went the other way, down about 0.4% over the year. Both movements are small, and neither is a forecast. Over five years the index is up roughly 11%.
Council tax is where the sums start working in your favour. Band C is the most common in Bude, and about 41% of dwellings sit in bands A or B. A band D bill in this area runs to roughly £2,590 a year, which is the figure worth holding against whatever you are currently paying.
Renting is a wider picture than the town itself. Typical private rent across the Cornwall area runs at about £1,000 a month, a mean from the national price index rather than a median of what is advertised in an agent's window. By size, one-bedroom places average about £690 a month, two-bedroom about £880, three-bedroom about £1,080, and four or more about £1,510. Those are Cornwall-wide averages covering everything from the north coast to the Fal, so use them for shape rather than as a quote.
Against local earnings the picture is honest rather than comfortable. Modelled gross household income for the area, before tax, was about £43,300 in the financial year to March 2023. Set that beside a median sale near £355,000 and you have a town that is affordable by Cornish coastal standards and still a stretch on a single local wage. The people buying detached houses here are largely not being paid by anyone in Bude.
On floor area, the median works out at roughly £3,970 per square metre across the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate, which is about three quarters of them. The typical matched property came in at around 90 square metres. That is a real house, not a coastal shoebox, and it is the number that explains why the headline price feels reasonable to people arriving from anywhere with a train station.
The bedroom mix from the 2021 census backs that up. About 38% of households have three bedrooms, roughly 28% have two, around 23% have four or more, and about 12% have one. Bude is a three-bedroom town with a decent supply of four-bedroom stock behind it, which is not the pattern you get in a place that turned itself into holiday flats.
On cost, Bude is doing better than most of the coast it shares a county with. Solid sale volumes, a low council-tax profile, and real floor area behind the price make value one of the stronger things this town has going for it.