The typical Wapping home sells for about £745,000, and it is almost always a flat. Very few houses come up at all. Flats go for a little over £700,000. The odd terraced house goes for nearly a million. What Wapping charges for is the riverside postcode, and the floor space is a smaller part of the bill.
The Land Registry recorded 184 sales in Wapping in the year to mid-May 2026, at a median of about £745,000. Flats made up 176 of them, with a median of about £703,000. The other eight were terraced houses, at a median of about £965,000. A buyer who wants a house with a front door onto the street is waiting for one of a few a year, and so is everyone else on the waiting list. On a flat at these prices, find out who owns the freehold and how long the lease has left to run, because that decides what you are buying as much as the view does.
The official house price index for the area dropped about 15% in the twelve months to May 2026, and flats on their own dropped by almost exactly the same amount. That index puts its average at about £444,000, well under what Wapping sells for, because it covers far more than this stretch of riverside. It records the past year. It says nothing about the price of the flat you are looking at, however hard a seller leans on it.
Band E is the most common council tax band in Wapping, and only about 18% of homes are in the two cheapest bands, A and B. Tower Hamlets charges about £1,838 a year for band D, which makes it a useful marker against whatever you pay now.
Typical private rent in Tower Hamlets runs at about £2,410 a month as of April 2026. That figure is a borough-wide mean from the Office for National Statistics' rent index, so a riverside flat in Wapping can easily come in above it. By size across the borough, a one-bedroom home averages about £1,960 a month, two bedrooms about £2,380, three about £2,700 and four or more about £3,330. In Wapping, renting is the normal arrangement, and buying is the unusual one.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across Wapping at about £76,000 before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That figure is a few years old and gross, while a mortgage is paid from what is left after tax. Even so, it is a high income, and a median sale of about £745,000 still makes buying here a stretch for a household on it. Most local earners rent here, and the purchase usually needs either a second big salary or a previous property sold somewhere else.
For the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, the median price was about £9,200 per square metre, and the typical home behind that figure measures about 66 square metres. Only about 16% of sales could be matched, so the figure comes from a small sample. Even so, it makes the point: buyers here pay central London prices for space, and in a flat that size a spare bedroom does well to fit a desk.
The 2021 Census puts about 33% of Wapping homes at one bedroom, 43% at two, 18% at three and about 7% at four or more. A family that needs three bedrooms is fishing in a small pond, and most of what is in it is a flat.
Wapping is an expensive place to buy, with a high entry price, few houses and not much space for the money. The past year's falls have made it a little less expensive, and that is all.