About £335,000 for a typical house, which buys you a smaller home here than almost anywhere inland. Terraces cost more than semis. Detached homes cost half again. Very little changes hands in any given year. The number is not the shock; what the number gets you is.
Over the year to May 2026 the Land Registry recorded 78 sales at a median of £335,000. Broken down by type, terraced homes ran to about £342,000 across 37 sales, flats about £287,500 across 18, semi-detached about £270,000 across 11, and detached about £515,000 across 12. Semi-detached being the cheapest thing on the list tells you where the money sits, because the semis are the ones built away from the old town and the terraces are the ones within earshot of the harbour. Seventy-eight sales in twelve months is also a thin market, and thin markets do odd things to medians, so treat the type-level figures as direction rather than gospel.
The published house price index for the area put the average at about £280,000 in May 2026, up 4% over the preceding twelve months. Flats went the other way over the same period, ending marginally down by under half a percent. Neither of those is a story worth writing home about; one is modest growth, the other is a rounding error with an attitude.
Council tax is the part of the bill that flatters the place. Band B is the most common band, and about 49% of dwellings sit in band A or B. A band D home in this area faces an annual bill of around £2,590, which is the figure most readers can hold against their own.
Renting is only measurable at county level. The national rent index gives a mean private rent of about £1,000 a month across the Cornwall area as of April 2026, which is an area average rather than St Ives's own figure, and a mean rather than a middle-of-the-market one. By size, that breaks down to around £690 for a one-bedroom home, £880 for two, £1,080 for three, and £1,510 for four or more.
Against local earnings, the arithmetic is uncomfortable. Modelled gross household income for this area averaged about £43,000 in the financial year to March 2023, before any tax comes off it. Set that beside a £335,000 median and the gap is the whole reason the town argues about housing at all. Nobody is buying a terrace here on a single local wage, and the people who are buying are mostly not earning here.
Measured per square metre, the price is about £3,800 across the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, which is roughly 54% of them. The typical matched home came in at 81 square metres. That is the honest version of what your money buys: a compact home at a per-metre rate that would look at home in a city, wrapped in granite and pointed at the sea.
The stock behind those numbers is mid-sized rather than grand. Census 2021 puts about 38% of homes at three bedrooms, 30% at two, 17% at four or more and 15% at one. So the thing most buyers are hunting is the three-bedroom house, which is also the thing most locals already live in and have no reason to sell.
Prices here are middling for what they are: not the eye-watering premium of the celebrated coastal names, not remotely a bargain either, and firmly out of step with what the area actually earns. You are paying a fair price for a small house in a place that a great many people want a piece of.