About £255,000 for the typical house, which on the English coast is close to a clerical error. A flat here goes for less than a garage in some counties. Detached houses stay under four hundred thousand. Most of the town sits in the cheap end of the council tax bandings. Paignton is not cheap because nobody wants it. It is cheap because the money that inflated the rest of the south coast walked past and kept going.
The Land Registry recorded 780 sales in the year to late May 2026, at a median of around £255,000. The split by type is the interesting part. Flats came in at a median of about £142,000 across 154 sales. Terraces at around £220,000 across 209. Semis at about £270,000 across 207. Detached houses at roughly £371,000 across 210. That is an unusually even spread of transactions across all four types, which means the market has genuine depth rather than one dominant stock type carrying everything. Whatever shape of house you want, somebody sold one here recently.
Direction of travel is soft. The published house price index for the area, at May 2026, shows an average price of about £222,000, down around 2% over the preceding twelve months and down about 1% over the month. Flats have moved further, down roughly 5% across the year. Over five years the same index is up around 8%. None of that is a collapse and none of it is a boom. It is a market that gave back a little after gaining a little, which is what most of the country looks like when nobody is pretending otherwise.
Council tax lands mostly in band C, and about 41% of dwellings sit in bands A and B combined. A band D bill in this area runs to roughly £2,470 a year, which is the figure worth holding against whatever you currently pay.
Renting across the Torbay area averages about £900 a month. That is a mean from the national rent index covering the whole local authority, not a median of what is currently advertised in Paignton, so treat it as the shape of the market rather than a quote. By size, one-beds average around £606, two-beds around £800, three-beds around £976, and four-beds and larger around £1,271.
On affordability, modelled gross household income for the area in the financial year to March 2023 came to about £45,300 before tax. Set that against a median sale price of around £255,000 and the arithmetic is friendlier here than almost anywhere else with a beach at the end of the road. It is not free money and a single income still has work to do, but the gap between what people earn here and what houses cost here is narrower than the coastal postcode would lead anyone to expect.
By floor space, the median works out at about £3,120 per square metre across the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate, which is roughly 77% of them. The typical matched property had a floor area of around 87 square metres. The number is a useful sanity check against a listing that claims to be generous.
On bedrooms, which is what people actually search by, Census 2021 puts around 40% of households in three-bedroom homes, about 29% in two-beds, roughly 19% in four or more, and around 12% in one-beds. That is a family-shaped housing stock in a town whose reputation says otherwise.
Cost is where Paignton stops being a compromise and starts being an argument. On what you pay for what you get, this is one of the strongest things about the place.