A typical Dorking home sells for about £455,000, and the average hides as much as it tells you. Flats are the cheap way in. A semi runs well past half a million. Detached houses go for nearer £900,000. The median is what you pay to get into the town, not what you pay for the house you pictured.
In the Land Registry's year to mid-May 2026, 190 homes sold in Dorking at a median of about £455,000. By type, flats went for a median of about £277,000, terraces about £439,000, semis about £568,000 and detached houses about £883,000. So the jump from flat to terrace is steep, the jump from terrace to semi is steeper, and the jump to detached is where the family budget gives up. The detached figure rests on only 31 sales, so treat it as a guide to the order of magnitude, not a quote. Estate agents will talk about "a range of properties". This is it.
The published house price index for the area barely moved. Average prices rose about 1% in the twelve months to May 2026, to around £541,000, and flats fell about 1% over the same period. Neither figure is a boom or a slump. Over five years the index is up about 9%. Anyone selling you urgency on the basis of those numbers is selling urgency.
Most homes are in council tax band D, where the bill here runs about £2,520 a year, and only about 15% sit in bands A or B. The cheap bands exist in theory, the way cheap parking exists in theory.
Renting is priced accordingly. The typical private rent across Mole Valley was about £1,550 a month as of April 2026. That's an average for the whole district, not for Dorking's own streets, and it comes from the Office for National Statistics' rent index, so it's a mean, not a median of what's advertised. By size, one-beds averaged about £1,140 a month, two-beds about £1,450, three-beds about £1,850 and four-beds or larger about £2,570. The index rose about 2% on the year.
Incomes here are high, which is the only reason any of this works. Modelled gross household income, before tax, averaged about £71,000 across the area in the financial year to March 2023. That puts a flat within reach of a solid local income and a terrace within reach of two. A detached house, for most people, needs the equity from somewhere more expensive, and plenty of Dorking's buyers turn up with exactly that.
For the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which is about 74% of them, the median price was about £5,700 per square metre, on a typical floor area of 79 square metres. That's a mid-sized home at a price that assumes you'll spend your weekends up Box Hill, not indoors measuring the box room.
The 2021 Census shows what's on the shelf. About 17% of households have one bedroom, 28% two, 32% three and 23% four or more. Three-bed family homes are the biggest group, which suits the town, because the families are the ones buying.
Dorking's prices are middling rather than extreme: a flat will still let you in the door, but everything with its own garden gate costs you properly.