About £240,000 buys the typical house here, which for a Cornish postcode reads like an error someone forgot to correct. Detached homes go for under £300,000. Terraces sit close to £200,000. Flats change hands around £117,000. This is one of the few addresses in the county where being near the coast is not billed as an extra.
The Land Registry logged 264 sales in the year to late May 2026, at a median of £240,000. Detached houses came in at about £297,500 across 90 sales, semis at £240,000 across 81, terraces at £207,000 across 68, and the 25 flats that sold had a median of about £117,000. The detached figure and the flat figure are barely in the same market, let alone the same town.
The house price index put the average for the area at about £280,000 as of May 2026, up about 4% across the twelve months. Flats went the other way over the same period, down by less than half a percent, which is closer to a rounding error than a movement. Both are published changes, not predictions.
Council tax is where the town quietly makes its case. Band B is the most common, about half of all dwellings sit in band A or B, and the annual bill runs to roughly £1,730 in band A and about £2,590 in band D. Anyone arriving from a place where band D is the entry level rather than the aspiration should sit with that figure for a moment.
Renting is measured across Cornwall rather than town by town. Typical private rent across the Cornwall area was about £1,000 a month as of April 2026, up about 5% over the year, with one-bedroom homes around £690, two-beds around £880, three-beds around £1,080 and four-bedroom places around £1,510. Those are mean figures from the national rent index rather than a median of what is advertised in the local windows, so they describe the county's shape and not your next tenancy.
Set against local earnings, the numbers behave. Median gross household income, modelled by the Office for National Statistics and averaged across the area, was about £45,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That describes 2023 rather than today, and it is a whole household rather than one salary, but next to a £240,000 median it explains why the barrier to buying here is rarely the price itself.
Measured by floor area, the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate, about 89% of them, had a median of about £2,900 per square metre on a typical floor area of 83 square metres. That covers the measurable portion of the market rather than every transaction, and 83 square metres is the size this town is built around.
The bedroom mix explains the rest. About 43% of households have three bedrooms, about 27% have two, about 20% have four or more and about 10% have one, on the 2021 census count. Three bedrooms is the default setting here, which is worth knowing before you spend a fortnight searching for a two-bed and wondering why the results keep running out.
Whatever else the town has to answer for, the cost of getting in is not on the list. On price, this is where St Austell is at its strongest.