Glastonbury is the only town in England where the property market and the ley lines are discussed with equal seriousness. Most people own their homes. The typical resident is past fifty. A third of households rent. It is not the commune the name suggests, and it is not a normal Somerset market town either, and the gap between those two things is where the whole place lives.
The housing stock is more conventional than the reputation. Terraces run to roughly 30% of every dwelling on the council-tax valuation list, with detached and semi-detached homes at around 20% each, flats another 20%, and bungalows just under 10%. About a fifth of the stock predates 1930, which means the Georgian and Victorian frontages you notice walking up the High Street are a minority holding a majority of the attention. Around 74% of homes run on mains gas, and roughly 10% are heated by electricity alone, which is the figure to check before you fall in love with a stone cottage on a January viewing. On energy certificates, about 55% of certificated stock sits in bands A to C, roughly a third sits at band D, and around 11% lands at band E or worse. The band E and worse group is where the old, solid-walled, hard-to-insulate property clusters, and it is not evenly distributed across the town.
On price, the Land Registry's last twelve months put the typical sale at around £264,000 across 120 sales, which is a genuine market rather than a handful of transactions being asked to speak for a whole town. The spread by type is wide. Flats came in at about £141,000, terraces at roughly £253,000, semi-detached homes at around £280,000, and detached houses at about £415,000. That detached-to-flat gap is close to threefold, and it maps onto geography as much as bricks. Council tax reflects the same picture from the other end: band B is the most common band, and roughly 52% of dwellings sit in bands A or B combined. This is not an expensive town by the standards of the counties either side of it.
Renting is a different conversation, and the honest figure is a wide one. Typical private rent across the Somerset area runs at about £990 a month, which is a local-authority average rather than Glastonbury's own number, so treat it as the shape of the market and not the price of a specific flat off Benedict Street.
Safety is where the town's numbers turn awkward. Police recorded crime runs at roughly 158 offences per thousand residents over the twelve months to May 2026, which sits around 70% above the Somerset average. That is a published rate, calculated on its own population base, and it is the weakest thing about Glastonbury on paper. Anti-social behaviour and public order offences both run noticeably above the England and Wales share, and shoplifting does too. What the headline rate does not tell you is where it happens, and in a town this size with this many visitors, a concentrated town-centre pattern and a quiet residential street can sit four minutes' walk apart. The rate is real. The experience of it depends heavily on which door you buy.
Schools are steadier than that. At key stage 2, maths scores across the five primaries in these postcodes average around 103, which is above the expected standard. At key stage 4, the single secondary in the area scores about 46 on Attainment 8. Ofsted has graded 101 of 140 settings across Somerset as good or better, with five outstanding. St Dunstan's School carries the secondary provision, and the primary options include St Benedict's, Elmhurst Junior, St John's, and Brookside Community, with Meare Village and West Pennard serving the villages. Millfield School and Millfield Preparatory sit in the picture for anyone going independent. Typical journey times are about eight minutes by car to a primary and roughly eight and a half to a secondary, which is the quiet advantage of a small town.
Connectivity is the thing that decides whether Glastonbury works for you. There is no station, and about 0.2% of residents commute by train, which is a polite way of saying nobody does. Roughly 47% drive to work and about 31% work from home, the highest single alternative to the car. There are 57 bus stops in the area, with weekday services averaging around 163 departures per stop and every one of them carrying a weekend service too, which is better provision than most towns this size manage. Broadband is genuinely good: about 77% of premises can get gigabit, roughly 80% can get ultrafast, and around 99% can get superfast, with no premises below the universal service obligation. The working-from-home number and the broadband number are the same fact told twice.
The surroundings are the best thing here, and it is not close. Green space sits an average of roughly 160 metres from a Glastonbury doorstep, with around 18 separate spaces within a kilometre, and water is about 260 metres away on average with a great many access points, which is what happens when you build a town on a dry point in the middle of drained wetland. The National Cycle Network runs close to about 95% of postcodes. The flood picture is the price of that setting. On the Environment Agency's postcode indicators, roughly 18% of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood measure including surface water, and about 21% carry a medium one. Measured differently, on the river-and-sea flood zones, about 8% of the area sits in zone 2 and under 1% in zone 3. Those two figures measure different things and both are true. Around 9% of the area has a recorded historic flood, and the last recorded event dates to 2009. On geology, roughly 88% of the area sits in the higher compressible-ground classes, and around 91% falls into radon band three or above, which means a radon test is a sensible line item rather than a scare story.
Heritage cuts both ways. There are 157 listed buildings in the town, nine of them grade one, eight grade two star, and 140 grade two, alongside six scheduled monuments and the Glastonbury conservation area. If you buy inside that boundary or into a listed building, your window replacements, your solar panels, and your extension are all subject to consent, and the answer is sometimes no. If you buy outside it, none of that applies and you get the view of the Tor anyway. This is the single most consequential thing a Glastonbury buyer can check before making an offer.
The character of the place shows in the household figures. About 64% of homes are owned outright or on a mortgage, the median age is roughly 50, and median household income runs at around £47,900. That is an older, settled, moderately comfortable town rather than a young one, and the alternative-shop economy on the High Street is supported by a population that has been here a long time. This page also covers Baltonsborough, Meare and Westhay, the villages out on the Levels where the housing is scarcer, the roads are droves, and the water table is a topic of conversation rather than a search result.
Glastonbury suits people who want a small town with real surroundings, who work from home or drive, and who are not buying primarily on the crime statistics. It suits anyone who wants period property at a price that would be laughable in Wells or Bath, and anyone whose life improves by having the Levels, Ham Wall and the Tor within a walk. It suits retirees and it suits the self-employed.
It does not suit rail commuters, at all. It does not suit anyone who needs a hospital close by, at roughly 39 minutes' drive. And it does not suit buyers who will read the crime rate, buy anyway on the strength of the view, and then be surprised by a town centre that carries a visitor economy and its consequences.
The town has form for attracting people who arrive looking for something. Thomas Bramwell Welch, who worked out how to stop grape juice fermenting and founded a soft-drinks empire on it, was born here in 1825. Dion Fortune and Frederick Bligh Bond came for the abbey and the occult, Geoffrey Ashe for the Arthurian material, and Eckhart Tolle and Eileen Caddy for whatever came next. Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, two miles out, which is a rather more grounded literary claim than the town usually makes for itself.
Glastonbury is an average place to live with two very unaverage numbers pulling in opposite directions. Its real strength is the setting: the green space, the water, the Levels and the walking, which is as good as anywhere in Somerset and better than most. The weak spot is safety, and the gap between the local crime rate and the county average is too large to explain away. Buy on the right street, outside the conservation boundary, with the radon test done and the flood indicators checked, and it is a good and cheap place to live. Buy on the view alone and the town will let you.