Average house price in Bath 2026: what buyers paid

The median home in Bath and North East Somerset sold for £399,950 in 2025, across 2,624 standard residential transactions recorded by HM Land Registry. That makes Bath the dearest local authority Homecost has mapped outside London — and, by a clear margin, more expensive to buy than its larger neighbour Bristol, where the 2025 median was £350,000.

Yet Bath households pay the lowest council tax in the West of England. The 2026-27 Band D charge for Bath and North East Somerset is £2,383.42, comfortably below Bristol's £2,713.68. Dearest to buy, cheapest to run: a pattern that breaks the assumption that an expensive area is expensive on every line.

This guide sets out what buyers actually paid across Bath in 2025 — by neighbourhood, by property type, and against the wider West of England — using Land Registry sold-price records rather than asking prices or estimates.

The headline: £399,950, but the average is much higher

Two numbers describe the Bath market, and they sit far apart.

The £100,000 gap between the median and the mean is the signature of a market with a long, heavy top end. Bath's Georgian terraces and the prime townhouses of Lansdown and Bathwick pull the average well above the midpoint. The median — the price of the middle sale — is the fairer guide to a typical purchase, which is why it leads here. (HM Land Registry, 2025 completions, data retrieved June 2026.)

Dearer than Bristol: the West of England ladder

Bath sits at the top of its travel-to-work area on price. Across the four West of England unitary authorities, the 2025 median ran like this:

The spread from top to bottom is 1.27x — tight by national standards; Greater London runs roughly 3x between its dearest and cheapest boroughs. It is also a reminder that the famous city is not always the dearest one to buy. Bristol is more than twice Bath's size by transaction volume, but the median Bath purchase cost £49,950 more. For the full picture next door, see our companion guide to the average house price in Bristol.

Bath by postcode district

Within Bath and North East Somerset, three postcode districts carry enough 2025 sales to rank reliably:

The ladder runs 1.66x, from the former Somerset coalfield towns of BA3 — Radstock and Midsomer Norton, south of the city — up to central and northern Bath in BA1.

One caveat is worth stating: the BA postcode area is wider than the Bath and North East Somerset authority. BA4 (Shepton Mallet), BA5 (Wells), BA6 (Glastonbury), BA11 (Frome) and BA16 (Street) sit in Somerset Council territory, not B&NES. The table above is filtered to the authority itself, so those districts are excluded — but a raw "BA postcode" search would otherwise mix in several other councils.

Houses, flats and the terrace question

Bath's 2025 sales broke down by property type as follows:

Terraced houses were the single largest category by volume — 31.4% of sales — which Bath shares with Bristol. But the price ordering is different. In Bristol, the terraced median edged above the semi-detached median, an unusual inversion driven by sought-after inner-city Victorian streets. In Bath the ordering is conventional: detached, then semi, then terrace, then flat. Houses of all kinds — detached, semi and terraced — made up 80.4% of sales.

Did Bath prices rise in 2025?

Barely, on the raw numbers — and the mix-adjusted index points slightly the other way.

The median was £400,000 in 2024 and £399,950 in 2025: essentially flat, a £50 difference. A raw median moves with the mix of what sold as much as with underlying values, so it is not a price index on its own. The Office for National Statistics UK House Price Index — which adjusts for that mix — shows the Bath and North East Somerset index easing from 101.7 in March 2025 to 100.4 in March 2026, a fall of about 1.3% over the year. The wider South West index slipped 0.8% (98.1 to 97.3) over the same period, while the UK index was flat at +0.1%.

Read together, the flat raw median and the modestly negative index point the same way: Bath prices were broadly flat to slightly softer over the year to March 2026. These are published figures for a period that has already happened, not a forecast.

What it costs to buy at the Bath median

A £399,950 purchase sits above the £250,000 point where the 5% stamp duty band begins, and above the £300,000 first-time-buyer nil-rate ceiling — so the tax bill depends heavily on the buyer's situation.

A first-time buyer pays the partial relief rate — nothing on the first £300,000, then 5% on the £99,950 above it — because the median sits below the £500,000 ceiling at which first-time-buyer relief disappears entirely. (HMRC residential SDLT rates, 2026; the additional-property figure adds the 5% surcharge across the whole price.) Any price can be run through the Homecost stamp duty calculator, which covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

On the mortgage side, a £399,950 home bought with a 25% deposit (£99,988) leaves a loan of around £299,962. At the Bank of England's latest quoted 75% LTV five-year fixed rate of 4.32% (April 2026) over a 25-year term, that works out at approximately £1,637 a month, and around £191,000 of interest over the full term. An individual rate will depend on the lender, deposit and credit profile. The Homecost mortgage calculator is seeded with these figures so the deposit, rate and term can be changed.

Then comes the running cost — and here Bath turns the price story on its head:

Bath is the dearest of the four authorities to buy into but the cheapest to run on Band D council tax — about £330 a year less than Bristol next door. (gov.uk Band D averages, 2026-27; the actual bill depends on a property's band and any local precepts.) It is the same "priciest to buy, cheapest tax" pattern Homecost found in Leeds, and the inverse of Bristol, where the bigger city is mid-priced to buy but the dearest to run.

On energy, of the roughly 47,000 Bath and North East Somerset properties with a lodged Energy Performance Certificate, 32.6% are rated C or above and 67.4% sit at band D or below. Bath's large stock of period and listed Georgian housing — much of it hard to retrofit without consent — keeps the older-band share high, broadly in line with Bristol's 70.4%.

How Bath compares

Against the other places Homecost has mapped, on 2025 median sale price:

Bath is the second-dearest of the set, behind only London — a striking position for a city of under 200,000 people, and a function of its World Heritage core, constrained supply and fast commuter links to Bristol and along the M4.

See the true cost for any Bath street

Land Registry medians describe the market; they do not tell you what a specific home costs to own. To see the all-in monthly cost — mortgage at today's rate, council tax, energy and stamp duty — for real properties, search any Bath postcode on Homecost, or browse more local guides in the Regional Prices section of the Homecost blog. For the bigger-budget picture either side of the Bath median, see the true cost of buying a £400,000 home or a £500,000 home.

Based on 2,624 HM Land Registry transactions and 2026-27 council tax data. This is general information, not advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.