About £225,000 buys the middle of the Plymouth market. Flats sit a long way under that. Terraces sit just below it. Detached houses are the outlier everyone else in the city is selling to. For somewhere with this much water attached, those numbers read like a filing error nobody has got round to correcting.
The Land Registry recorded about 2,970 sales in the year to May 2026 at a median of £225,000. Flats came in at a median of about £136,000, terraces about £210,000, semi-detached houses about £262,000 and detached houses about £395,000. That spread is the whole story of the place in four numbers: the flat market and the detached market are barely in the same conversation, and most of Plymouth is buying and selling in the terraced band between them.
The published house price index put the average Plymouth property at about £219,000 in May 2026, up about 4% over the preceding twelve months and about 24% over five years. Flats were the exception, unchanged to the nearest whole percent across the same twelve months, which is what happens when a city has a large student population, a large flat stock and no particular hurry. Neither figure is a forecast. They describe what already happened to the index area.
Council tax lands lightly here by national standards. Band A is the most common band and about 65% of dwellings sit in bands A or B, which is a striking share for a city of this size. For anyone comparing against their current bill, band D runs at roughly £2,440 a year.
Renting typically costs about £990 a month, and that is the typical private rent across the Plymouth area rather than a figure attached to any one street. It comes from the official private rent index and is a mean rather than a median of advertised listings, so it will not match the three cheapest results on a letting site. By size, as of April 2026, a one-bedroom runs around £695, a two-bedroom around £870, a three-bedroom around £1,050 and anything with four or more bedrooms around £1,470.
Set against local earnings, the sums are unusually civilised. Modelled household income for the area was around £50,000 gross, before tax, in the financial year to March 2023, which is not a current figure but is the most recent one measured. A median sale price of £225,000 against that kind of household income is a mortgage conversation rather than a fantasy, and it is the single most important thing about buying here. Plenty of coastal cities have stopped offering that conversation altogether.
By floor area, the market prices at a median of about £2,780 per square metre across the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's recorded floor space, which is about 87% of them. The typical measured home behind that figure is about 85 square metres. The remaining sales are unmatched rather than excluded for being unusual, so treat it as the shape of the market rather than a valuation tool.
The bedroom mix explains what buyers actually find when they search. At the 2021 census, about 41% of households had three bedrooms, about 29% had two, about 16% had four or more and about 14% had one. Three-bedroom stock dominates to the point where the two-bedroom hunt gets competitive and the one-bedroom hunt mostly means a flat.
On cost alone, Plymouth is doing something the rest of the south west largely gave up on. The prices, the council tax bands and the relationship between a median sale and a local income all point the same way, and affordability is not a consolation prize here. It is the reason the city keeps quietly collecting people who priced themselves out somewhere prettier.