In Covent Garden the typical home sells for one pound short of a million, and the typical home is a flat. Houses hardly come into it. Prices have dropped hard over the past year, so the market is softer than it was. It is still expensive, just less so than a year ago.
The Land Registry recorded 29 sales in Covent Garden in the year to mid-May 2026, at a median of £999,999. Every one of those 29 was a flat, so the flat median and the overall median are the same number. With that few sales, two penthouses or one awkward basement can move the median a long way. A median of £999,999 is about the most Covent Garden way of saying "under a million" there is.
The house price index for the area puts the average price at about £836,000 in May 2026, down by more than a fifth on the year before. Flats on their own fell by a similar amount over the same twelve months. The index puts flats at about £743,000 and the occasional terraced house at £1,503,393. That is a real fall in an area where the same streets have changed hands for centuries. It describes the last twelve months and says nothing about the next twelve.
Band G is the most common council tax band in Covent Garden, and only about 3% of homes are in bands A or B. Westminster's charges are low by London standards. A band D home pays about £1,050 a year, and even band H comes in at about £2,100. Of all the costs of living here, council tax is the one that won't hurt.
Renting is the normal arrangement here, and the Office for National Statistics puts typical private rent for Westminster as a whole at about £3,150 a month as of April 2026, down about 4% on the year. That borough average works out at £2,505 for a one-bed, £3,253 for a two-bed, £3,831 for a three-bed and £5,360 for four bedrooms or more. These are average rents from the national index across the whole borough, so they say little about any one block off Long Acre. The index doesn't publish a figure for studios or single rooms.
The Office for National Statistics models average gross household income here at about £76,600 for the financial year to March 2023. That is before tax, and it is three years old. It is a good income almost anywhere in the country. Next to a median sale of £999,999, it buys a lot of viewings and not many completions. Buyers here are usually bringing equity, a bonus or family money, because salary alone gets nowhere near.
Small homes dominate. The 2021 Census found that about 48% of households have one bedroom, 35% have two, 12% have three and about 5% have four or more. Nearly all of these homes are flats, many of them in old buildings with long and complicated leases. So the useful question to ask is about the lease length and the service charge history, because in a period building those two can cost more over ten years than the stamp duty.
Covent Garden is one of the least affordable places to buy a home in the country, and last year's fall has done little to change that.