London Borough Monthly Cost: Mortgage vs Council Tax 2026
Council tax in London ranges from £1,028 a year in Wandsworth to £2,609 in Kingston upon Thames for a Band D home in 2026-27 (gov.uk) — a 2.5-times spread across a single city. That gap gets a lot of attention. But when you add it to the mortgage on a median-priced home, council tax turns out to be a small part of the monthly bill: between 2.4% and 11.1% across the 33 boroughs, and never more than a ninth. The mortgage does the heavy lifting everywhere.
A companion analysis of London's council tax and house-price inversion showed something genuinely surprising: the boroughs that are dearest to buy tend to charge the lowest council tax. Prime-central Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea sit near the bottom of the Band D table; cheaper outer boroughs such as Kingston and Croydon sit at the top. This piece asks the follow-up question — does that inversion survive once you look at what a buyer actually pays each month? The short answer, from the numbers below, is no. The council-tax league table barely moves the monthly cost.
How these figures are built
To compare like with like, every borough uses the same buyer profile: a purchase at the borough's median 2025 sale price (HM Land Registry, cat A residential, houses and flats), a 25% deposit, and a 25-year repayment mortgage at the Bank of England's most recent quoted rate for a 75% loan-to-value five-year fix — 4.32% as of April 2026. Council tax is the 2026-27 Band D charge for each borough (gov.uk), divided by twelve.
The "all-in monthly" column is deliberately narrow — mortgage plus council tax only. It excludes energy, buildings insurance, maintenance, and any ground rent or service charge, all of which depend on the individual property rather than the borough. Holding those aside is what lets the table isolate the two costs that are set by where you buy: the mortgage (driven by price) and the council tax (set by the local authority).
The 33-borough table
Sorted by the monthly cost of a median-priced home, cheapest first.
| Borough | Median price (2025) | Band D 2026-27 | Mortgage/mo | Council tax/mo | All-in/mo | Council tax share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barking and Dagenham | £380,000 | £2,199 | £1,555 | £183 | £1,738 | 10.5% |
| Croydon | £425,000 | £2,600 | £1,739 | £217 | £1,956 | 11.1% |
| Bexley | £430,000 | £2,366 | £1,760 | £197 | £1,957 | 10.1% |
| Newham | £450,000 | £1,944 | £1,842 | £162 | £2,004 | 8.1% |
| Havering | £450,000 | £2,425 | £1,842 | £202 | £2,044 | 9.9% |
| Greenwich | £460,000 | £2,108 | £1,883 | £176 | £2,058 | 8.5% |
| Sutton | £459,975 | £2,379 | £1,882 | £198 | £2,081 | 9.5% |
| Lewisham | £475,000 | £2,237 | £1,944 | £186 | £2,130 | 8.8% |
| Enfield | £480,000 | £2,268 | £1,964 | £189 | £2,153 | 8.8% |
| Hounslow | £485,000 | £2,186 | £1,985 | £182 | £2,167 | 8.4% |
| Tower Hamlets | £500,000 | £1,838 | £2,046 | £153 | £2,199 | 7.0% |
| Hillingdon | £510,000 | £2,045 | £2,087 | £170 | £2,258 | 7.6% |
| Redbridge | £510,000 | £2,295 | £2,087 | £191 | £2,278 | 8.4% |
| Bromley | £525,000 | £2,140 | £2,149 | £178 | £2,327 | 7.7% |
| Southwark | £535,000 | £1,967 | £2,189 | £164 | £2,353 | 7.0% |
| Ealing | £535,000 | £2,139 | £2,189 | £178 | £2,368 | 7.5% |
| Lambeth | £540,000 | £2,047 | £2,210 | £171 | £2,381 | 7.2% |
| Waltham Forest | £540,000 | £2,387 | £2,210 | £199 | £2,409 | 8.3% |
| Merton | £550,000 | £2,147 | £2,251 | £179 | £2,430 | 7.4% |
| Brent | £550,000 | £2,235 | £2,251 | £186 | £2,437 | 7.6% |
| Harrow | £550,500 | £2,511 | £2,253 | £209 | £2,462 | 8.5% |
| Kingston upon Thames | £550,000 | £2,609 | £2,251 | £217 | £2,468 | 8.8% |
| Haringey | £575,000 | £2,314 | £2,353 | £193 | £2,546 | 7.6% |
| Hackney | £581,125 | £2,060 | £2,378 | £172 | £2,550 | 6.7% |
| Barnet | £580,000 | £2,133 | £2,374 | £178 | £2,551 | 7.0% |
| Wandsworth | £647,505 | £1,028 | £2,650 | £86 | £2,736 | 3.1% |
| Islington | £640,250 | £2,108 | £2,620 | £176 | £2,796 | 6.3% |
| Hammersmith and Fulham | £700,000 | £1,520 | £2,865 | £127 | £2,991 | 4.2% |
| Richmond upon Thames | £720,000 | £2,486 | £2,947 | £207 | £3,154 | 6.6% |
| Camden | £770,000 | £2,208 | £3,151 | £184 | £3,335 | 5.5% |
| City of London | £790,000 | £1,330 | £3,233 | £111 | £3,344 | 3.3% |
| Westminster | £865,000 | £1,050 | £3,540 | £87 | £3,627 | 2.4% |
| Kensington and Chelsea | £1,150,000 | £1,667 | £4,706 | £139 | £4,845 | 2.9% |
Council tax figures are Band D; most homes are not Band D, so treat the column as a benchmark rather than a specific bill. Mortgage figures assume a 25% deposit at 4.32% over 25 years — an individual rate depends on the lender, deposit and credit profile. City of London rests on just 142 sales in 2025 and is indicative only.
The mortgage is 89–98% of the monthly cost
Across the 33 boroughs, the mortgage accounts for between 88.9% (Croydon) and 97.6% (Westminster) of the mortgage-plus-council-tax total, with an average of 92.7%. Council tax is the remainder. Because the mortgage scales directly with the purchase price and dwarfs everything else, the ranking of boroughs by monthly cost lines up almost perfectly with the ranking by price — the two orderings have a rank correlation of +0.997. The ranking by council tax, by contrast, runs slightly the other way against the monthly cost (rank correlation −0.35), which is exactly the inversion the earlier borough analysis identified. It is real, but it is swamped.
Wandsworth versus Barking: the inversion does not survive
Take the sharpest pairing. Wandsworth has the cheapest Band D in the whole of England at £1,028.21; Barking and Dagenham charges £2,198.51 — 2.1 times as much. On the council-tax axis alone, Barking looks far more expensive to run.
Yet a buyer at each borough's median faces the opposite reality month to month. Barking's median home (£380,000) works out at about £1,738 a month; Wandsworth's (£647,505) at about £2,736. Barking's council tax is roughly £98 a month higher, but Wandsworth's mortgage is around £1,095 a month higher — so Wandsworth costs close to £1,000 more per month despite its rock-bottom council tax. The £1,170-a-year council-tax saving in Wandsworth offsets less than a tenth of the extra mortgage.
Croydon and Kingston: dear council tax, cheap to run
The same logic explains the two boroughs with London's highest council tax. Kingston upon Thames tops the Band D table at £2,609.20 and Croydon is second at £2,599.91 — but both are mid-to-cheap to buy, so both land low on the monthly cost table. Croydon (£425,000 median) comes out as the second-cheapest borough to run per month at about £1,956, behind only Barking, even though it has almost the dearest council tax in the capital. Kingston sits 22nd of 33 on monthly cost despite ranking dead last on council tax. A high Band D charge simply cannot outweigh a low purchase price once the mortgage is in the frame.
Why the two costs pull in different directions
The divergence comes from how each charge is set, and neither mechanism involves any judgement about value:
- A mortgage scales with price. Borrow 75% of £1.15m in Kensington & Chelsea and the monthly payment is roughly 3.7 times the payment on 75% of £380,000 in Barking. Price is the dominant lever.
- Council tax is a flat per-band charge on frozen 1991 values. English bands are still based on what a property was worth on 1 April 1991, and Band H — the top band — starts at just £320,000 (1991). Because the scale stops there, a £1.15m home cannot be charged proportionately more than a £400,000 one. Prime-central boroughs also run large commercial tax bases, letting them set a low charge; the mechanics are set out in our guide to how council tax bands are assessed.
- The London-wide precept is uniform. Every borough's Band D includes the same Greater London Authority precept, so it is not the source of the spread — the differences come from each borough's own charge and adult-social-care precept.
The upshot is that the council-tax league table and the price table describe two almost unrelated things, and only one of them — price — moves the monthly bill by much. For the wider pattern of where prices sit across the capital, see our breakdown of inner versus outer London house prices; for the national picture on council tax, see the cheapest and most expensive local authorities in England.
What this leaves out
Three caveats keep the table honest. First, it covers only the mortgage and council tax — energy, insurance, maintenance and any leasehold service charge sit on top and vary by property, not by borough policy. Second, it ignores one-off purchase costs such as stamp duty, which fall heavily on the pricier boroughs and would widen the gap further. Third, Band D is a benchmark: most homes are in other bands, and the actual bill scales up or down from the figures shown.
None of that changes the headline. In every one of the 33 boroughs, council tax is a single-digit-to-low-double-digit slice of the monthly cost, and the mortgage — set by the purchase price — decides what a home costs to run.
This is general information, not financial, tax or mortgage advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.
Based on 78,876 HM Land Registry residential transactions across the 33 London boroughs in 2025, 2026-27 council tax Band D figures from gov.uk, and the Bank of England's April 2026 quoted 75% LTV five-year fixed rate. Browse more market analysis.
See your own numbers
The table uses each borough's median, but every street is different. Enter a postcode to see the true monthly cost of the homes on it — for example a Westminster postcode where prices are high but council tax is low — or run your own price, deposit and rate through the mortgage calculator to see how the payment, not the council tax, sets the bill.