A typical home in Islington costs about £689,000, and that money mostly buys a flat. Four in five sales are flats. The houses start at seven figures and go up from there. Over the past year prices have come down a little, though not by enough for anyone to call it a bargain. The question here is less what a house costs than whether you can find one for sale.
The Land Registry recorded 654 sales in the year to May 2026, at a typical price of about £689,000. Flats made up 527 of those sales, at a typical £622,500. The 115 terraced houses that sold went for about £1,750,000. Only nine semi-detached houses changed hands, at around £2,450,000, and just three detached houses, at about £1,850,000. With so few sales, those last two prices depend on which particular houses happened to sell. In Islington, a front door that belongs to nobody else is a luxury good.
The official house price index for Islington put the average at about £670,000 in May 2026, down about 6% on a year earlier. Flats fell slightly faster, by about 7%. That is a real drop, enough to give a buyer some room to negotiate. It is a measure of the last twelve months, though, and says nothing about where prices go next. Anyone pricing a flat off last year's sale on the same staircase is working from a number the index has already moved past.
Band D is the most common council tax band, and only about 18% of homes are in bands A or B. Islington charges about £2,108 a year for band D, the figure most buyers can hold against their current bill.
Renters in Islington paid about £2,810 a month on average in April 2026, up roughly 4% on the year, according to the Office for National Statistics index for the borough. That is an average across the whole council area, from the estates to the squares. By size, one-bedroom homes averaged about £2,130, two bedrooms about £2,640, three bedrooms about £2,940 and four or more about £4,150. These are averages, not the price of the cheapest flat on the market, and the index publishes no figure for studios or rooms. Rent has gone up while sale prices came down, which tells landlords and buyers different things.
The Office for National Statistics models the median household income across these neighbourhoods at about £72,700 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. Set that against the price of a typical flat and it is clear that buying here depends on a large deposit, two good incomes or a sale somewhere else. For anyone starting from scratch on one salary, it is a long climb. The income figure is an average for neighbourhoods that range from the very well off to the hard-pressed, so few households earn exactly that.
Measured by floor area, Islington homes sold for a median of about £12,000 per square metre, and the typical home behind that figure was about 91 square metres. Only about 38% of sales could be matched to an energy certificate that records floor area, so the figure covers the sales that can be measured, not every sale. It is still the clearest sign of what space costs here. Every square metre of a Barnsbury kitchen is priced like a parking space in the West End.
The 2021 census counted about 32% of households in one-bedroom homes, 39% in two bedrooms, 20% in three and about 9% in four or more. Buyers looking for a third bedroom are looking at a fifth of the stock, and most of the people already living in those homes are staying put.
Islington is expensive for what it offers on price alone, and the past year's fall makes it slightly less so. The market rewards money you already have more than money you earn.