Average house price in Southampton 2026: what buyers pay

Southampton's typical home sold for £260,000 in 2025, based on 2,644 completed Land Registry sales of houses and flats across the city. That sits comfortably below the £295,000 median for England and Wales — and, remarkably, within £1,000 of its Solent neighbour Portsmouth, where the typical home changed hands for £259,000. Two of the south coast's biggest cities, a few miles apart, are priced almost identically — but as the numbers below show, what you pay each month is not quite the same.

The figures here come from HM Land Registry's Price Paid records for the Southampton City Council area (postcode data mapped to the local authority, not the SO postcode area, which spreads out into Eastleigh, the New Forest and Winchester). All prices are 2025 completed sales of detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat homes, fetched on 6 August 2026.

What "average" means here

The median Southampton sale — the middle of every transaction — was £260,000 in 2025. The mean was higher, at £277,370, pulled up by a thin tail of larger detached houses; the gap between the two (about £17,000) is modest by big-city standards. Half of all sales fell between £195,000 (the lower quartile) and £325,000 (the upper quartile).

The market has been flat. The 2024 median was also £260,000, so on a like-for-like basis the typical price did not move over the year. The mix-adjusted UK House Price Index, which controls for the type of homes selling, tells a slightly softer story: on a three-month average to April 2026 versus the same period a year earlier, Southampton's index was down about 1.5%, the wider South East down 0.4%, while England as a whole was up 1.4%. These are backward-looking measures of what has already happened, not a prediction.

Price by area

Southampton is one of the most evenly priced cities in the data. Its dearest and cheapest postcode districts are separated by just 1.25 times — flatter even than Portsmouth (1.40 times) and a world away from cities with a premium-suburb tail.

The eastern suburbs edge the ranking; the city centre (SO14) is the cheapest district, reflecting its heavier weighting of flats. Busiest of all was SO19 in the east, with 696 recorded sales.

Price by property type

Flats were the single most-traded type in Southampton in 2025 (839 sales), a marker of a city with a large rental and first-buyer market. That is a genuine difference from Portsmouth, where terraced houses dominate. A detached house cost roughly 2.4 times a flat.

Southampton vs Portsmouth: near-identical price, different bill

The two Solent cities are priced within £1,000 of each other, but their running costs diverge. Portsmouth's 2026-27 Band D council tax is £2,291.71; Southampton's is £2,381.48 — about £90 a year more. Both remain below the £2,410.97 average across England's 296 billing authorities.

Southampton's housing stock is also modestly more energy-efficient — more on that below.

Council tax

Southampton's Band D bill for 2026-27 is £2,381.48, according to the gov.uk council tax dataset. Band D is a benchmark, not the bill most people pay: the charge scales from Band A (six-ninths of Band D, about £1,587) up to Band H (twice Band D). Your band depends on the property's 1991 valuation, and the Valuation Office Agency — not the council — sets it. To see how Band D fits the wider national picture, our guide to council tax bands explains how the system works.

How energy-efficient is the stock?

Of about 35,280 Southampton homes with a current Energy Performance Certificate, 38.1% are rated C or above and just 1.8% sit in the lowest F or G bands, based on the latest certificate held for each address. That is greener than Portsmouth (32.6% rated C or above) and close to the roughly 40% share across England and Wales. The thin F/G tail reflects a largely urban, post-war stock rather than the solid-wall rural homes that drag down efficiency in coastal and countryside areas. A home's rating tracks its build era closely — our EPC guide for buyers explains what the bands mean and why older homes tend to score worse. (EPC running-cost estimates are modelled on dated assumptions and are not a reliable guide to a current energy bill.)

What it costs each month

Take Southampton's median home at £260,000. A buyer with a 25% deposit would borrow £195,000. At the Bank of England's most recent quoted rate for a five-year fix at 75% loan-to-value — 4.32% as of April 2026 — that works out to roughly £1,064 a month over a 25-year term. Add Band D council tax of £198 a month and the core housing cost comes to about £1,262 a month, before energy, insurance, maintenance and one-off buying costs.

The equivalent Portsmouth home (£259,000, £2,291.71 Band D) lands near £1,251 a month — the two cities' monthly bills, like their prices, sit within a whisker of each other, with council tax the small tiebreaker.

Your own figure will depend on your deposit, term, lender and credit profile. You can run any Southampton postcode through the Homecost true-cost tool — try SO19 9AA in Woolston for the eastern-suburb end — to see the all-in monthly cost on real sold prices. For a fuller worked example at this budget, see our breakdown of the true cost of buying a £250,000 home.

Stamp duty

At the £260,000 median, a home mover in England pays £3,000 in Stamp Duty Land Tax (an effective rate of 1.15%), while a first-time buyer purchasing their main residence pays nothing — the price sits under the £300,000 first-time-buyer nil-rate threshold (HMRC, 2026). A buyer of an additional property, such as a second home or buy-to-let, would pay £16,000 once the 5% surcharge is added.

At the top of the market the picture changes: a £380,000 detached house carries £9,000 of duty for a mover, £4,000 for a first-time buyer (relief tapers away between £300,000 and £500,000) and £28,000 as an additional property. You can check any price on the stamp duty calculator. This is general information, not advice — speak to a qualified adviser or conveyancer before acting.

The bottom line

Southampton offers a large, evenly priced city market: a median a little under the England-and-Wales figure, a flat-heavy sales mix, and among the most uniform price geography of any city in our data. It sits almost exactly level with Portsmouth on price, a touch above it on council tax and energy efficiency. To compare the wider region, see our guides to Plymouth and Bristol, or browse all regional price guides.

Figures based on HM Land Registry Price Paid data (2,644 Southampton sales, 2025), gov.uk 2026-27 council tax levels, EPC Open Data and Bank of England quoted rates.