Around £340,000 for a typical house, which buys you considerably less waterfront than the brochure photography implies. Terraces and flats cluster near that middle figure. Detached houses live in a different price universe altogether. Barely more than a hundred homes changed hands across a whole year. The headline number is ordinary; almost nothing underneath it is.
The Land Registry recorded 65 sales in the twelve months to May 2026, with a median of about £340,000. Split by type, the picture gets honest fast: 27 terraced sales at a median near £320,000, 14 flats at roughly £305,000, 14 semi-detached at about £276,000, and 10 detached houses at a median close to £915,000. Semi-detached homes are the cheapest thing on the list and detached homes cost more than three of the other categories stacked together. In most towns the property ladder has rungs. Here it has a trapdoor and then a helicopter.
Direction of travel is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. The house price index for the area put the average at around £364,000 as of May 2026, down about 6% over the preceding twelve months. Flats fared worse, down roughly 10% over the same year. Those are published changes for the index area rather than a forecast, and they describe a market that has come off its peak, not one climbing away from buyers.
Council tax is the part of the bill where Dartmouth behaves like a normal town. Band C is the most common band, and about 35% of dwellings sit in bands A and B, the two cheapest. A band D property in this area carries an annual charge of roughly £2,600, which is the figure most readers can hold against their own bill without doing any mental arithmetic.
Renting is not really the town's main event, given how much of the housing stock is doing seasonal work instead. The typical private rent across the South Hams area runs to about £1,000 a month, a mean from the national rent index rather than a median of listings, and a district-wide figure rather than Dartmouth's own. By size, one-bedroom homes average around £730 a month, two-bedroom around £910, three-bedroom around £1,120, and four or more bedrooms around £1,610.
Against local earnings, none of this is comfortable. Modelled household income for the area was roughly £47,000 gross, before tax, in the financial year to March 2023. Set that against a median sale price of around £340,000 and you have a market where the ordinary purchase is a stretch and the detached market is a separate economy funded from somewhere else. Nobody buys a £915,000 house in Dartmouth on a Dartmouth salary.
On a per-square-metre basis, the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, about 69% of them, come in at a median near £3,500 per square metre, on a typical floor area of 93 square metres. That is the number that explains the sensation buyers describe when they walk into their fourth viewing of the day and realise the price stopped tracking the house some time ago and started tracking the estuary.
The stock itself is sized for households rather than singles. Census counts put about 39% of homes at three bedrooms and 30% at two, with roughly 12% at one bedroom and 18% at four or more. Three-bed is the default search, and it is also the most competitive one.
Costs here land somewhere in the middle: not the eye-watering coastal premium of the places Dartmouth gets compared to, not a bargain either, and cheaper on paper than it feels once you have seen what the money actually buys. The average is affordable-ish. The house you want probably is not.