About half a million buys the median house. Seventy-one sales in the last twelve months. The modal council tax band is E. About one in seven homes sits in the cheaper Band A or B. A small market, at a settled price, in a town that isn't asking anyone's permission to charge it.
The headline is around £471,000 for the typical sale over the last twelve months. Split by property type the picture sharpens. Flats trade at around £257,000. Terraced houses at around £415,000. Semi-detached at around £445,000. Detached houses at around £625,000. The gap between a flat and a detached is where the town's whole class geography lives, and both ends of it come with the same postcode. Around seventy-one homes changing hands over a year is thin trading for a town of this size, which means listings sit around and the seller sets the pace, not the buyer.
Council tax lands in Band E for the modal property. Only about one in seven homes sits in the cheaper Band A or Band B, which is the arithmetic reason most Steyning households pay a middle-to-upper band bill every year on top of the mortgage they took out to be there. The council tax roll here doesn't do budget. The cheap end of the register is small, the middle is large, and the upper bands are well populated by anything with a bit of land or a view of the Downs.
Renting follows the same shape at a smaller scale. The typical private rent across the Horsham area is around £1,450 a month, which is a local-authority figure rather than a Steyning-specific one; treat it as the shape of the market. Broken down by bedroom count: a one-bed averages around £1,000 a month, a two-bed around £1,330, a three-bed around £1,670, and four bedrooms or more comes in around £2,400. Renting here is not the cheap option. It's the not-yet-buying option, and the maths of getting from one to the other is the maths of the deposit, not the monthly.
The typical Steyning household earns a shade over £61,000 a year. The typical house sells for around £471,000. That's a price-to-income multiple of roughly seven and a half, which is a stretch by any reasonable lending calculation and a serious stretch for a single earner on the local median. Two earners on the local median can approach it with a substantial deposit and the right timing. A single earner cannot. Most of the buyers here arrive with equity from somewhere else, which is what keeps the market moving at the price it moves at. The town isn't priced for the salaries inside it. It's priced for the equity that arrives from outside it, which is why the median resident is fifty-four and not thirty-four.
Two out of five on value, which is what the numbers say when you take the sales pitch out of them. Steyning costs what Steyning costs. The maths either works or it doesn't, and no amount of describing it as a Downs town will change the multiple.