A typical Guildford home costs close to half a million pounds. A flat goes for around £275,000. A detached house wants about £860,000. Prices have slipped over the past year. Dear, but for now no dearer.
The Land Registry's figures for the year to late May 2026 put the typical sale at about £485,000, across 745 sales. By type, flats went for around £275,000, terraces £440,000, semis £531,000 and detached houses £860,000. The jump from terrace to semi is about the price of a side return and a parking space, which in Guildford is exactly what it is. The jump from semi to detached is closer to the price of a second house somewhere else entirely. The median sits in the middle because the middle is where most of the buying happens, not because anyone set out to buy a median.
The official house price index for Guildford had the average price down about 6% in the year to May 2026, with flats down about 8%. Those are published changes over one year, not a forecast. They're big enough to notice and to raise with an agent who opens with how fast things are moving. Flat owners took the sharper knock, which suits a first-time buyer and doesn't suit a first-time seller.
Band D is the most common council-tax band, and only about 10% of homes sit in bands A or B. A band D bill in Guildford runs to about £2,547 a year. The cheap bands barely exist here, so a buyer comparing Guildford with somewhere further out should compare the council-tax bill as well as the price.
Renting while waiting for the market to settle costs about £1,720 a month, the typical private rent across the Guildford area as of April 2026. That's a borough-wide mean from the Office for National Statistics' rent index, not the rent for any particular street or listing. By size, a one-bed averages about £1,170 a month, a two-bed £1,520, a three-bed £1,840 and a four-bed or larger about £2,510. Room and studio rents aren't published at this level. Anyone hoping to rent a room cheaply near the university will find the landlords got there first.
The Office for National Statistics modelled the average gross household income, before tax, at about £70,600 for the financial year to March 2023. That's a well-paid town by most standards, and it still makes a £485,000 house a stretch for a single-income household and a careful calculation for most couples. The income figure is also a few years old and pre-tax, so the real gap between pay packet and price tag is wider than the headline pair suggests. Guildford's buyers mostly arrive with equity from somewhere else, and the prices assume they will.
Of the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, about 80% of the total, the median price works out at about £5,670 per square metre, on a typical floor area of about 91 square metres. That figure strips out the noise of a sale mix that swings between flats and detached houses from month to month. It's also the number to have in mind when a listing's floor plan looks generous and the asking price looks more generous still.
At the 2021 Census, about 16% of Guildford homes had one bedroom, 24% had two, 33% had three and 28% had four or more. Three bedrooms is the most common home, which is also the size every family buyer in town is chasing at once. Four-bed homes are far from rare, and the detached prices show who's buying them.
Guildford costs about what its schools, its trains and its hills would lead anyone to expect, and the last year has taken a little off the top. Middling value for the money, on a price that was never going to be low.