About £260,000 for a typical house, which in Dorset terms is an administrative error nobody has got round to correcting. The county sells its coastline at Sandbanks prices and its stone villages at second-home prices, and then there is Gillingham, quietly moving houses at figures that would embarrass a Blackmore Vale estate agent if the agent were the embarrassable type. The market here is busy rather than exclusive. The flats in particular are priced at a level that will make anyone arriving from the south of the county check the listing twice. This is the cheap end of Dorset, and it does not pretend otherwise.
The Land Registry recorded 179 sales in the year to May 2026, with a median of £260,000. The spread by type does most of the explaining. Detached homes came in at a typical £366,500, semis at £255,000, terraces at £215,000 and flats at £114,500. That flat figure is the outlier of the whole picture, and it is why the median alone tells you less than the split does. Two people can both buy in Gillingham and have entirely different conversations about what property costs.
On the published house-price index for the area, the average price was around £326,400 as of May 2026, up about 1% over the twelve months and up about 11% over five years. The twelve-month move is small enough that calling it anything other than flat would be generous. Flats went the other way over the same year, down about 2%. Neither of those is a forecast, and neither should be read as one.
Council tax lands where the prices suggest it would. Band C is the most common in the town, and around 33% of dwellings sit in bands A or B. A band D bill runs to roughly £2,765 a year, which is the number worth holding against whatever you are paying now.
Renting is measured across the wider Dorset authority rather than Gillingham itself, so treat it as the shape of the market and not the price of a specific front door. The typical private rent across the Dorset area is about £1,040 a month, a mean from the national rent index rather than a median of advertised listings, and up about 4% over the year. By size, one-beds sit around £720 a month, two-beds around £950, three-beds around £1,170, and four or more bedrooms around £1,660.
Against local earnings, the arithmetic is unusually kind by Dorset standards. Modelled gross household income for the area, before tax, was around £50,300 in the financial year to March 2023, which is the year that figure describes rather than today's position. Set that against a £260,000 median and the gap is real but crossable, particularly at the terraced and semi-detached end. Households buying detached at £366,500 are making a different calculation entirely.
Per square metre, the median works out at roughly £3,300 across the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which covers about 78% of them. The typical matched property had around 83 square metres of floor space. That is a small house by the standards of the surrounding countryside, and it is the number to hold in your head when a listing photograph makes a room look generous.
On bedroom mix, the Census in 2021 found around 38% of homes with three bedrooms and around 32% with two, so the town is built around the ordinary family house. Roughly 23% have four or more, and about 8% have one, which explains why the one-bed rental figure exists in a market with almost nothing to let.
Value for money is where Gillingham is genuinely difficult to beat: an active market, a moderate median, cheap council tax bands, and a floor under it all set by flats at a price most of Dorset stopped offering years ago. Whatever else you weigh up about the town, cost is not the part you will lose sleep over.