Around £251,000, which is not what the scenery leads you to expect. Flats make up most of what actually changes hands. Council tax sits in the cheapest band more often than any other. Almost nothing comes to market in a given year. The price tag is reasonable; the problem is finding one attached to a house.
The Land Registry recorded eight sales across the islands in the year to the middle of May 2026, at a median of about £251,000. Five of those eight were flats, at a median of roughly £240,000. That is the whole market: not a segment of it, not a sample, the entire year's worth of completed transactions. Houses do sell here, but not in numbers large enough for the Land Registry to publish a separate typical figure for them, which tells you something about how the place works. Buyers do not shortlist three properties and weigh them up. They wait, and then they move fast on whatever appears, because the alternative is waiting again.
Council tax lands softer than the purchase prices suggest. Band A is the most common band across the islands, and 42% of dwellings sit in band A or band B. A band D property runs to about £2,050 a year, which is the figure most people can hold against their own bill and get an immediate read. The banding still reflects what these properties were worth at the 1991 valuation, back when a granite cottage forty kilometres offshore was a liability rather than an asset, and nobody has been in a hurry to revisit that.
On affordability, the Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income before tax for this area at roughly £39,000 for the financial year to March 2023. Set that beside a median of £251,000 and the arithmetic is workable rather than punishing, particularly compared with the coastal Cornwall postcodes people usually consider first. The catch is not the number. It is that an island income tends to be seasonal, tends to come from tourism, and tends to look different to a lender than the same figure earned in an office on the mainland. Getting a mortgage agreed on a listed property with a poor energy certificate, on an island with a hospital two hours away, involves more conversations than the price alone would predict.
The bedroom mix from the 2021 Census explains why the flats dominate the sales figures. Three-bedroom homes are the largest group at 38%, two-bedroom at 27%, four or more at 18%, and one-bedroom at 17%. That is a normal-looking distribution for a small town, and the housing here has to do several jobs at once: year-round homes, seasonal staff accommodation, and holiday lets, all drawing on the same small pool. The one-bedroom and two-bedroom stock is where that competition bites hardest, which is precisely the stock a first-time buyer or a returning islander is looking at.
For what you get, Scilly prices better than almost anywhere else with this much coastline and this little frost, and value is one of the stronger things the islands have going for them. Just understand that the price is the easy part, and the queue is the rest of it.