A typical house here sells for about £322,500. A detached one runs to £405,000. A flat goes for £177,500. Eighty-five sales in a year, in a town where the whole market fits on a couple of pages. These are working prices in a county that mostly quotes postcard ones.
The Land Registry recorded 85 sales in the year to April 2026, at a median of £322,500. Split by type, the 35 detached sales came in at a median of £405,000, the 21 terraces at £250,000, the 18 flats at £177,500, and the semi-detached at £300,000 off just 11 sales. Eleven semis in twelve months is not a market, it is a waiting list, and anyone who wants that particular shape of house should expect to be patient rather than decisive.
The published house price index puts the average for the area at about £280,000 as of May 2026, up 4% over the previous twelve months and about 11% across five years. Flats went the other way by less than half a percent over the same year, which is not a crash and not a signal, just a segment sitting still while houses moved. Nobody should read either number as a forecast.
Council tax sits at the affordable end. Band B is the most common, 47% of dwellings fall in bands A or B, and a band D bill runs to roughly £2,590 a year. That is the figure worth holding against whatever you currently pay, because it is the one that arrives every April regardless of how the market behaved.
Renting is measured at county level rather than town level. The Office for National Statistics puts typical private rent across the Cornwall area at about £1,000 a month as of April 2026, and that is a mean from the rent index, not a median of what is currently advertised in Wadebridge windows. By size, the county figures come out at around £690 a month for a one-bedroom, £880 for two, £1,080 for three and £1,510 for four or more. Treat those as the shape of the county, not a quote.
Against local earnings, the maths is the familiar Cornish problem. Modelled gross household income for the area, before tax, was about £46,200 for the financial year to March 2023, with modelled net income of roughly £35,700 once tax is taken. That is a couple of years old and it is an average across households rather than a wage, but it makes the position clear enough: a median-priced house here is not something one ordinary local salary reaches, and the market is held up by two incomes, equity brought in from elsewhere, or both.
By floor space, the sales that can be matched to an energy certificate come out at a median of about £3,650 per square metre, off the 59% of sales that can be measured that way. The typical matched property runs to about 80 square metres, which is a modest three-bedroom footprint rather than a generous one. Space is the thing you are actually buying, and it is priced accordingly.
The bedroom mix explains why the middle of the market moves and the edges do not. Census 2021 puts 38% of households in three-bedroom homes, 27% in two, 24% in four or more, and 11% in one. Three bedrooms is the default here, so that is where the competition sits and where the pricing is most honest.
Value is one of the stronger things Wadebridge has going for it. Nothing about these prices is cheap, and anyone arriving from a low-cost part of the country will feel the coastal premium immediately, but for a town with an estuary at the bottom of it, the numbers are noticeably more reasonable than the county's reputation implies. You pay for Cornwall. You do not, at least, pay for the view.