A home in Westminster typically sells for about £780,000, and for that money you get a flat. Houses barely come into it. Almost every sale is an apartment, most of them one or two bedrooms. Prices have dropped hard over the past year, and the starting point was so high that the drop still leaves them expensive. In the shadow of the abbey, the word "house" survives mainly in the Houses of Parliament.
The Land Registry recorded 123 sales in the year to May 2026, at a typical price of about £780,000. Flats made up 122 of them, also at a typical £780,000, so the type split is one line long. The one sale that was not a flat does not add up to a market. Asking what a terraced house costs in Westminster is like asking the Grenadiers to name their favourite bus route.
The official house price index for the area shows the average price down by more than a fifth in the year to May 2026, with flats falling by slightly more. On that index the typical flat stood at about £743,000 by May 2026, and the average across all homes at about £836,000. Those are published changes over twelve months and they describe what has happened, with nothing to say about next spring. Anyone who bought at the top in mid-2025 has had a year of very polite letters from their lender.
Council tax is the part that comes in under expectations. The most common band is G, only about 7% of homes fall in bands A or B, and Westminster charges about £1,050 a year at band D, with band H at about £2,100. A flat worth three quarters of a million pounds can carry a smaller council tax bill than a semi in plenty of towns where the semi costs a quarter of that.
Most people here rent, and across the whole of Westminster, typical private rent came to about £3,150 a month as of April 2026, down about 4% on the year. That figure is a mean from the Office for National Statistics' rent index for the borough, so a few very expensive lets pull it upward. By size, the borough averages about £2,500 a month for a one-bed, £3,250 for a two-bed, £3,830 for a three-bed and £5,360 for four or more bedrooms.
Local incomes are high and still nowhere near the prices. The Office for National Statistics models average household income here at about £74,700 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. Set against a typical sale of £780,000, that makes buying a stretch for almost anyone relying on salary alone. Gross income is the cheerful version of the payslip, and even the cheerful version falls short.
On the sales that could be matched to an energy certificate's floor area, about 5% of the total, the typical price came to about £11,800 a square metre, for a typical home of about 53 square metres. That is a small sample, so read it as a rough measure of what the space costs. Fifty-three square metres is a decent one-bed, and in SW1 it is priced like a family house with a garden somewhere else.
The 2021 Census shows what the stock is built from. About 37% of homes have one bedroom, 40% have two, 19% have three and 5% have four or more. Most of the market, then, is a one or two-bed flat of roughly the size the floor-area figure describes, and the four-bed family home is a rarity you hunt for. Since nearly everything is a leasehold flat, the lease length and the service charge history deserve as much attention as the price, and particulars that lead with "porter" tend to bury both.
For what the money buys, Westminster is poor value: a typical flat costs more than ten years of a good household income, even after a year of falling prices, and the cheap council tax is the only line on the bill that behaves like a bargain.