Mayfair records about 1,650 crimes a year for every 1,000 residents, and a buyer has to make peace with that figure before the cornicing gets a look-in. Most of it is theft, and most of the targets are passing through. The residents are few and the people walking past them are not. That leaves a middling place to live, with a beautiful setting and one very unusual problem.
The Metropolitan Police's figures for the year to May 2026 put Mayfair at about 1,650 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents, roughly 275% above the Westminster average. The mix explains a lot. Theft from the person makes up about 29% of the total, against 2% across England and Wales, and other theft adds another 21%. Violence and sexual offences, the largest category almost everywhere, is about 12% here against 35% nationally. The Met as a whole charged someone in about 10% of cases over the same year, against 12% nationally, which puts it 33rd of 42 forces; that is a force-wide number, though it is the force that answers the phone here. The May Fair itself, with its bare-knuckle fighting and semolina-eating contests, was abolished in 1764 for being a public nuisance. The pickpockets seem to have missed the memo.
Changing a home here means asking a lot of people first. The area and its immediate surroundings hold 2,989 listed buildings, 180 of them Grade I and 327 Grade II*, inside a patch of central London carrying 47 conservation areas. Burlington House, started in the 1660s, is the only house from that first wave of building to survive, and the planners guard the later stock with the same devotion. Buyers who arrive with drawings for a glass box on the roof tend to spend their first year learning how listed building consent works.
The Land Registry logged 19 sales in the year to May 2026, at a median of about £2,974,000. Eighteen of those were flats, at a median of about £2,937,000, so in Mayfair the flat is the budget option and the budget option costs just under three million pounds. Council tax follows the same logic. Band H, the top band, is the most common, and only about 1% of homes fall into bands A or B.
Renting is the more common route in. Across Westminster, the council area this figure covers, typical private rent was about £3,150 a month as of April 2026, a borough-wide average that has to stretch from the cheaper corners of the borough to the dearest square on the Monopoly board.
The stock is almost all flats. On the council-tax valuation list, which covers every dwelling, about 90% are flats and about 8% terraced houses, with detached homes under 1%. About 54% were built before 1930. On energy performance, about 60% of certificated homes reach band C or better, respectable for buildings this old. Only about 48% of homes are on mains gas, and about 22% heat with electricity alone, which is a running cost worth seeing on the bills before anyone gets romantic about a Georgian drawing room.
Getting around is easy, though the Underground keeps a polite distance. Its stations line the edges of the district, and the one station ever built inside it closed in 1932, after which it briefly served Churchill's war cabinet and then nobody at all. Buses fill the gap. There are 407 stops in and around the area, each averaging about 990 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 50 in the busiest hour, and almost all of them run at weekends too. At the 2021 Census about 60% of working residents were working from home, about 16% walked to work and about 1% took the train; about two-thirds of households have no car. Gigabit broadband reaches about 86% of premises. When the commute is a walk, the trains are somebody else's concern.
Flood risk is low on the measure most buyers mean. None of Mayfair's postcodes lie in the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones. On the wider postcode indicators, which include surface water, about 6% of postcodes are at high risk on at least one indicator and about 4% at medium risk, which reflects heavy rain with nowhere to drain more than any threat from the Thames.
Schooling is stronger than a district this short of children has any right to expect. Ofsted has graded 25 settings covering the area, nine of them outstanding and 16 good, with none below good. St George's Hanover Square CofE Primary School is the local primary, and the one school in these districts with key stage 2 results averaged 108 in maths. Couples with children make up about 8% of households, so the competition for those places is mostly arriving from elsewhere.
The people who live here are mostly renting. About 30% of households own their home, the median age is 39, and about half of all households are one person living alone. Modelled gross household income averaged about £86,700 in the financial year to March 2023, an Office for National Statistics estimate for the wider surrounding area, a healthy figure that would still need about three decades of saving to buy the typical flat on the street outside.
The surroundings are where the address earns its fee. The nearest public green space is about 150 metres from the average front door, with Hyde Park along one edge, Green Park along another and Grosvenor Square in the middle. Open water is about 900 metres away. This page also takes in the slice of Victoria that shares Mayfair's postcodes, and it comes with the same parks on the doorstep.
Mayfair works for someone who wants central London on foot, parks within a few minutes in two directions and a flat with history in the plasterwork, and who can pay for it. It works less well for a family wanting a garden, a buyer hoping to remodel, or anyone who would lose sleep over a crime rate that high.
The safety picture comes down to awareness. The crime is concentrated on visitors' pockets and phones, the streets feel well policed and busy, and the figure is still the worst thing on this page. Set against it are the parks, the walkable everything and a setting the rest of London would buy if it could. Mayfair is a good address with an average life attached, provided the person living it keeps a hand on their phone.