Of the 296 English councils that set a Band D council tax rate for 2026-27, exactly two land on a whole pound. Only one lands on an exact multiple of £10. Not a single one lands on an exact £50 or £100. Compare that with local house price medians, where a separate Homecost analysis of 295 English local authorities found 82% sit on an exact £1,000 and two-thirds sit on an exact £5,000. Two everyday property numbers, both quoted to the nearest penny or pound on paper — and one of them is round almost all the time, while the other almost never is.
The round-number test, side by side
The test is simple: take a set of numbers and check how many land exactly on a "round" figure at a scale appropriate to their size. For council tax, that means checking against the nearest whole £1, £10, £50 and £100. For house prices — which run into six or seven figures — the equivalent round points are £1,000, £5,000, £10,000, £25,000 and £50,000.
| Council tax Band D, 2026-27 (296 authorities) | Count landing exactly on it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Nearest whole £1 | 2 | 0.7% |
| Nearest £10 | 1 | 0.3% |
| Nearest £50 | 0 | 0% |
| Nearest £100 | 0 | 0% |
| 2025 local authority house price medians (295 authorities) | Count landing exactly on it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Nearest £1,000 | 241 | 82% |
| Nearest £5,000 | 198 | 67% |
| Nearest £10,000 | 120 | 41% |
| Nearest £25,000 | 51 | 17% |
| Nearest £50,000 | 36 | 12% |
Council tax data: gov.uk council tax statistics, fetched 2026-09-19. House price medians: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, 2025 category-A residential transactions, calculated per authority in the round-number clustering piece above.
Where Band D actually lands
Band D bills for 2026-27 range from £1,028.21 in Wandsworth to £2,765.02 in Dorset — a 2.7x spread across England, and every figure in between is stated to the penny.
| Local authority | Band D 2026-27 |
|---|---|
| Wandsworth | £1,028.21 |
| Westminster | £1,049.55 |
| City of London | £1,329.56 |
| Hammersmith and Fulham | £1,519.51 |
| Kensington and Chelsea | £1,666.65 |
| … | … |
| Rutland | £2,737.58 |
| Nottingham | £2,755.39 |
| Lewes | £2,756.17 |
| Dorset | £2,765.02 |
Try any of these on the Homecost postcode tool to see how a specific Band D figure feeds into the full monthly cost of a property, alongside mortgage and energy estimates.
Only two authorities break the pattern of penny-precise figures: Derby, at an exact £2,306.00, and South Kesteven, at an exact £2,260.00 — which also happens to be the only one of the 296 that lands on a round £10 as well as a round £1. Every other authority's bill carries pence.
Why one number rounds and the other doesn't
The mechanism is different for each, and that difference is the whole story.
A house price is the outcome of a negotiation between a buyer and a seller, and people negotiate — and list — in round thousands: £250,000, not £249,750. A local authority median is the middle value (or average of the two middle values) of hundreds or thousands of individual sales in a given year. When most of the inputs to that middle value are themselves round, the median mechanically comes out round too. It isn't a coincidence or a rounding step applied afterwards — it's inherited straight from how people price property.
A council's Band D figure is not a market outcome at all. It's the result of a budget calculation: each authority sets a total council tax requirement (the gap between what it plans to spend and what it expects to raise from other income, such as business rates and government grants), then divides that figure by its "council tax base" — the number of Band D-equivalent properties in the area, adjusted for discounts, exemptions and collection rates. Both the numerator and the denominator are specific, area-by-area numbers with no reason to divide out to anything tidy, so the result is quoted to the penny because the penny is meaningful, not because anyone rounded it.
Derby and South Kesteven's exact figures are very likely a genuine coincidence of that division rather than a deliberate round number — with 296 independent calculations, a small handful landing on a whole pound by chance is exactly what you'd expect from figures that otherwise range continuously between about £1,000 and £2,800.
What this means for reading the numbers
None of this changes what anyone actually pays. But it's a useful reminder when comparing the two headline property numbers people search for side by side, as in Homecost's guide to how council tax bands are set: a local authority's house price median is a snapshot of what buyers agreed to pay, rounded by nothing more than habit, while its Band D figure is a precise administrative output that happens to look precise because it is. Treat a suspiciously round Band D bill (there are only two, and now you know which) as a coincidence worth a raised eyebrow, not a clue about how the sum was done.
For more data-led reads on how England's property and tax numbers actually behave, browse Homecost's Market Analysis section.
This is general information based on published data, not financial or tax advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before making decisions based on your own council tax band or local property prices.