About £292,000 for a typical Exeter house, which for a cathedral city in the south west is a genuinely reasonable number. A flat comes in well under that. A detached house comes in a long way over. Roughly a thousand homes changed hands in the last year. The city sells at four visibly different price points depending on what shape of roof you want, and the gap between the bottom and the top is the whole story.
Take the Land Registry's twelve months to late May 2026. The median sale across Exeter was £292,000, from 1,080 transactions, which is a busy enough market that the figure means something rather than being one odd sale wobbling an average. Underneath it, flats sold at a median of about £173,000 across 177 sales, terraces at £275,000 across 447, semis at £330,000 across 270, and detached houses at roughly £437,500 across 186. Terraces are the workhorse of the city and they set the tone. The detached figure is what people are quoting when they tell you Exeter has become expensive, and they are quoting the least common thing in the market.
Direction of travel is flat to slightly soft. The published house price index for the area put the average at about £281,000 as of May 2026, down around 2% over the preceding twelve months and up roughly 8% over five years. Flats specifically were down about 6% on the year, which is the sharper move and worth knowing if you are buying one to sell in three years rather than to live in. None of this is a collapse and none of it is a boom. It is a market that has stopped sprinting.
Council tax is one of the friendlier parts of the arithmetic. Band B is the most common in the city, and about 46% of dwellings sit in bands A or B combined. The band D annual bill runs to roughly £2,500, which is the figure most readers can hold against whatever they currently pay.
Renting is a different market with different pressures. Typical private rent across the Exeter local authority, measured as a mean by the Office for National Statistics price index in April 2026, is about £1,310 a month, up around 2% on the year. That is an area-wide figure covering the whole authority rather than any one street. By size, a one-bedroom averages roughly £910, a two-bedroom about £1,130, a three-bedroom around £1,360, and four or more bedrooms about £1,920.
Against local earnings, the picture is workable rather than comfortable. Modelled gross household income before tax for the area, covering the financial year to March 2023, was about £53,900, with net income after tax around £40,500. That is an older figure describing that year rather than a live one, but it puts a typical Exeter purchase in the territory where two working adults on ordinary salaries can reach it, which is not true in a lot of the south west. A flat is comfortably within range on one income. A detached house is not, for most people, without help or a long run at it.
By floor area, the median works out at about £3,630 per square metre across the sales that can be measured, meaning those matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which is roughly 85% of them. The typical matched home behind that figure runs to around 83 square metres. Small, in other words, by the standards of what people picture when they say house.
On bedrooms, the Census 2021 count puts about 38% of Exeter households in three bedrooms, roughly 27% in two, around 21% in four or more, and about 15% in one. The three-bedroom terrace or semi is the default unit, which is why it does most of the work in the price table.
Exeter comes out well on cost. You are buying a proper city, with the depth of market to prove it, at a price that would look like a misprint an hour east along the coast.