We are used to hearing about house prices in the abstract, as a single national average marching ever upwards. That average hides the thing that actually matters to anyone trying to buy a home: not what a house costs, but what it costs against what people nearby actually earn. A £300,000 house is a bargain on a City salary and an impossibility on a care worker's wage. Affordability is local, and it varies across the country far more sharply than the headline numbers suggest.
To see how sharply, we took the average price of every home sold in England and Wales over the three years to the end of 2025, and set it against the average household income in each area. The result is an affordability multiple: how many years of the local household income it would take to buy the local average home. We did this for 1,952 postcode districts, the outward part of the postcode such as LS6 or TS1, and the spread is remarkable.
The headline findings
- Across England and Wales, the average home costs about 6.4 times the local household income. The typical district sits at 6.1 times.
- The most affordable district is TS1 in Middlesbrough, where the average home costs just 2.2 times local income.
- The least affordable is SW1W in Belgravia, central London, at nearly 35 times.
- Every one of the twenty most affordable districts is in the North of England or the Welsh valleys. Nearly every one of the least affordable is in London.
- Two places break London's grip at the top: Sandbanks in Poole and Cobham in Surrey, where second homes and the commuter belt push prices to sixteen times local pay.
Where a salary still stretches
If you want your income to go furthest, head to Teesside. In TS1, covering central Middlesbrough, the average home sold for around £72,000 while the typical household earns a little over £32,000 a year. That is a multiple of just 2.2, comfortably the lowest in the country. A couple on ordinary local wages could, in principle, clear a mortgage there in a handful of years rather than a working lifetime.
The pattern behind the whole affordable list is consistent and tells its own story about modern Britain. It is dominated by the North East, industrial Yorkshire and the Welsh valleys: Grimsby, Bradford, Peterlee, Halifax, Stanley, Ferndale, Tonypandy. These are places where wages are modest, but house prices are so low that homes remain genuinely within reach. Affordability here is not a sign of prosperity. It is the arithmetic of areas the property boom largely passed by.
| Rank | District | Area | Avg. price | Household income | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | TS1 | Middlesbrough | £72,105 | £32,118 | 2.2 |
| 2 | DN31 | Grimsby | £84,032 | £33,849 | 2.5 |
| 3 | TS3 | Middlesbrough | £89,925 | £34,983 | 2.6 |
| 4 | CF43 | Ferndale, Rhondda | £98,274 | £37,346 | 2.6 |
| 5 | DL4 | Shildon, Co. Durham | £95,116 | £35,476 | 2.7 |
| 6 | S1 | Sheffield | £140,716 | £51,436 | 2.7 |
| 7 | BD3 | Bradford | £110,683 | £40,108 | 2.8 |
| 8 | SR8 | Peterlee | £107,254 | £37,672 | 2.9 |
| 9 | S4 | Sheffield | £116,414 | £39,908 | 2.9 |
| 10 | BD5 | Bradford | £118,827 | £39,295 | 3.0 |
| 11 | LE1 | Leicester | £146,347 | £47,987 | 3.0 |
| 12 | DL17 | Ferryhill | £116,209 | £37,230 | 3.1 |
| 13 | TS23 | Billingham | £141,465 | £45,064 | 3.1 |
| 14 | HX1 | Halifax | £129,697 | £41,222 | 3.1 |
| 15 | DH9 | Stanley, Co. Durham | £125,157 | £39,547 | 3.2 |
Where it barely covers the mortgage
At the other end, the numbers stop looking like anything an ordinary buyer could reach. In SW1W, the Belgravia and Pimlico district of central London, the average sale over the past three years was around £2.9 million against a local household income of about £83,000. That is a multiple of nearly 35. The top of this table is not really a housing market in the everyday sense; it is a global asset market, where homes are bought by the very wealthy and by overseas investors, and where the local salary figure is almost beside the point.
The ten least affordable districts in the country are all in prime central London, a roll call of Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Kensington, Chelsea, Notting Hill and St John's Wood. What is more telling is who joins them. Just outside the capital's grip sit Cobham in Surrey, heart of the stockbroker belt, and Sandbanks in Poole, the sliver of Dorset coastline famous as one of the most expensive places to live in the world. In Sandbanks the average home costs more than fifteen times the local income, not because Dorset wages are high, but because demand from second-home buyers and downsizers has pulled prices loose from the local economy entirely.
| Rank | District | Area | Avg. price | Household income | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SW1W | Belgravia, London | £2,902,738 | £83,509 | 34.8 |
| 2 | SW1X | Knightsbridge, London | £3,447,337 | £105,233 | 32.8 |
| 3 | W8 | Kensington, London | £2,767,454 | £99,562 | 27.8 |
| 4 | SW3 | Chelsea, London | £2,353,866 | £85,660 | 27.5 |
| 5 | W11 | Notting Hill, London | £2,014,906 | £74,689 | 27.0 |
| 6 | NW8 | St John's Wood, London | £1,803,553 | £71,984 | 25.1 |
| 7 | SW10 | West Chelsea, London | £1,737,500 | £76,460 | 22.7 |
| 8 | W2 | Bayswater, London | £1,589,246 | £71,763 | 22.1 |
| 9 | SW7 | South Kensington, London | £2,240,805 | £103,600 | 21.6 |
| 10 | W1H | Marylebone, London | £1,844,019 | £85,595 | 21.5 |
| 11 | W10 | North Kensington, London | £984,449 | £56,330 | 17.5 |
| 12 | NW3 | Hampstead, London | £1,585,004 | £92,968 | 17.1 |
| 13 | SW1P | Westminster, London | £1,343,607 | £83,217 | 16.1 |
| 14 | KT11 | Cobham, Surrey | £1,297,510 | £81,086 | 16.0 |
| 15 | BH13 | Sandbanks, Poole | £880,970 | £56,326 | 15.6 |
The north-south divide, in one number
Group every district by region and the country's oldest economic fault line appears with unusual clarity. London homes cost more than nine times local income on average. Cross into the North East and that figure more than halves, to under four and a half. The gradient runs neatly down the country: the further south and east you go, the more years of your life a home costs.
Average house price as a multiple of household income, by region. England and Wales, 2023 to 2025.
How the big cities compare
Cities tell a similar story with a few surprises. London stands alone, its homes costing around eleven times local income once you strip out the very cheapest and dearest fringes. But the next most stretched places are not the other big metros; they are the smaller, prosperous university and coastal cities. Oxford, Brighton and Cambridge all sit above eight times income, their house prices inflated by demand and constrained supply while local wages, decent but not spectacular, fail to keep pace.
The most affordable cities are the northern powerhouses that never saw prices run away: Bradford, Hull, Sunderland, Liverpool and Sheffield all come in under five times income. Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, the three big regional capitals, cluster together in the middle at around five to six times, more expensive than their neighbours but still a world away from the southern university cities.
Average affordability multiple across each city's residential districts. England and Wales, 2023 to 2025.
Why the gap is about wages, not just prices
It is tempting to read a map like this as simply a map of house prices, but that is not quite what it shows. It shows the relationship between prices and pay, and the two do not move together. In the affordable North, homes are cheap and wages are low, yet the ratio still works in a buyer's favour because prices have stayed tethered to the local economy. In the unaffordable South, wages are higher, sometimes much higher, but prices have climbed so far ahead of them that the extra income makes little difference.
The clearest illustration is the pair of outliers, Sandbanks and Cobham. Neither is a place of unusually high local earnings. What sets them apart is external demand: second-home buyers, downsizers cashing in London equity, and commuters who earn their money elsewhere and spend it on a postcode. When prices are driven by wealth from outside an area, local affordability collapses, and the salary of the people who actually live and work there stops being the thing that sets the market. That, more than any regional stereotype, is what separates the places where a wage still buys a home from the places where it never will.
Methodology and sources
House prices are the average (mean) price of residential property sold in each postcode district between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2025, taken from HM Land Registry Price Paid data, which covers England and Wales. We included standard residential transactions only and excluded a handful of nominal and clearly non-market entries. Because these are mean prices, a small number of very high-value sales can lift an area's figure, which is most visible in prime central London.
Household income is the estimated average annual household income for each area, based on the Office for National Statistics model-based income estimates for small areas, apportioned to postcode districts. These are modelled averages rather than tax records. The affordability multiple is the average sale price divided by the average annual household income.
We limited the study to the 1,952 postcode districts in England and Wales that had both at least 50 sales in the period and a residential population of at least 3,000 households, so that the rankings reflect places where people genuinely live rather than commercial or city-centre cores. Scotland and Northern Ireland maintain separate house price registers and are not included. Because the income estimates and sale prices cover slightly different periods, the exact multiples are best read as an indicator; the geographic pattern, which areas are affordable relative to local pay and which are not, is the robust finding.
Curious about a specific area? Check the house prices for any postcode, or see the full Council Tax band and neighbour comparison for a street.