London council tax vs house prices: a borough inversion
Buy the median home in Kensington & Chelsea and you will pay about £1,150,000 — three times the £380,000 median in Barking and Dagenham, London's cheapest borough to buy in. Yet the annual council tax on a Band D home in Kensington & Chelsea is £1,666.65, while in Barking it is £2,198.51. The far pricier borough charges roughly a quarter less to run.
That is not a quirk of two cherry-picked boroughs. Across all 33 London billing authorities, the price of buying a home and the cost of the council tax on it tend to move in opposite directions. Ranking every borough by its 2025 median sale price (HM Land Registry) against its 2026-27 Band D charge (gov.uk), the rank correlation between the two is negative — around −0.36 on a Spearman measure. Loosely: the more expensive a borough is to buy into, the lower its headline council tax tends to be.
Below is the full league table, and the structural reason the two run apart.
Every London borough, ranked by what buyers paid in 2025
Sale prices are the median of category-A residential transactions (detached, semi-detached, terraced and flats) completed in 2025, from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, retrieved 2 July 2026. Council tax is the 2026-27 Band D charge published by each authority. The final column shows where each borough ranks on council tax, from 1 (cheapest) to 33 (dearest) — so you can see the flip.
| # | Borough | 2025 median | Band D 2026-27 | Council-tax rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Barking and Dagenham | £380,000 | £2,198.51 | 19 |
| 2 | Croydon | £425,000 | £2,599.91 | 32 |
| 3 | Bexley | £430,000 | £2,366.36 | 26 |
| 4 | Newham | £450,000 | £1,944.23 | 7 |
| 5 | Havering | £450,000 | £2,424.66 | 29 |
| 6 | Sutton | £459,975 | £2,378.64 | 27 |
| 7 | Greenwich | £460,000 | £2,107.86 | 12 |
| 8 | Lewisham | £475,000 | £2,237.33 | 22 |
| 9 | Enfield | £480,000 | £2,267.67 | 23 |
| 10 | Hounslow | £485,000 | £2,185.56 | 18 |
| 11 | Tower Hamlets | £500,000 | £1,837.78 | 6 |
| 12 | Hillingdon | £510,000 | £2,045.46 | 9 |
| 13 | Redbridge | £510,000 | £2,294.58 | 24 |
| 14 | Bromley | £525,000 | £2,140.04 | 16 |
| 15 | Southwark | £535,000 | £1,967.26 | 8 |
| 16 | Ealing | £535,000 | £2,138.53 | 15 |
| 17 | Lambeth | £540,000 | £2,047.11 | 10 |
| 18 | Waltham Forest | £540,000 | £2,386.96 | 28 |
| 19 | Merton | £550,000 | £2,146.76 | 17 |
| 20 | Brent | £550,000 | £2,235.27 | 21 |
| 21 | Kingston upon Thames | £550,000 | £2,609.20 | 33 |
| 22 | Harrow | £550,500 | £2,511.07 | 31 |
| 23 | Haringey | £575,000 | £2,313.78 | 25 |
| 24 | Barnet | £580,000 | £2,132.60 | 14 |
| 25 | Hackney | £581,125 | £2,060.30 | 11 |
| 26 | Islington | £640,250 | £2,108.15 | 13 |
| 27 | Wandsworth | £647,505 | £1,028.21 | 1 |
| 28 | Hammersmith and Fulham | £700,000 | £1,519.51 | 4 |
| 29 | Richmond upon Thames | £720,000 | £2,486.10 | 30 |
| 30 | Camden | £770,000 | £2,207.55 | 20 |
| 31 | City of London | £790,000 | £1,329.56 | 3 |
| 32 | Westminster | £865,000 | £1,049.55 | 2 |
| 33 | Kensington and Chelsea | £1,150,000 | £1,666.65 | 5 |
(City of London rests on a small sample — 142 sales in 2025, mostly flats — so treat its median as indicative.)
For context, the London-wide 2025 median across all 78,876 recorded sales was £527,500, and the average Band D across the 296 English billing authorities is £2,410.97. Every one of the five cheapest-to-run London boroughs sits below that national average; Wandsworth's £1,028.21 is less than half of it.
The sharpest inversions
Read the table from the expensive end and the pattern jumps out. The five boroughs with the lowest Band D charges are almost all among the dearest places to buy:
- Wandsworth — the cheapest Band D in the whole of England at £1,028.21 — is the 7th most expensive London borough to buy in (median £647,505).
- Westminster (£1,049.55, 2nd-cheapest nationally) has a £865,000 median — the second-highest in the capital.
- Kensington & Chelsea, the most expensive borough to buy in at £1.15m, has the 5th-lowest Band D in London.
- Hammersmith & Fulham (£1,519.51, 4th-cheapest) carries a £700,000 median.
Now read from the cheap-to-buy end:
- Croydon is the second most affordable borough to buy in (£425,000) yet has the second-dearest Band D in London (£2,599.91).
- Kingston upon Thames has the highest Band D of all 33 (£2,609.20) on a mid-table £550,000 median.
- Barking and Dagenham, the cheapest borough to buy, still charges £2,198.51 — more than K&C, Westminster, Wandsworth, Hammersmith & Fulham and the City.
The relationship is a tendency, not an iron law. Richmond upon Thames is dear on both counts (£720,000 median, £2,486.10 Band D), and Camden is expensive to buy (£770,000) with a middling £2,207.55 charge. But the broad shape holds: prime inner London is cheap to run, and much of outer and eastern London is not.
Measured against what you paid, the gap is even wider
Because council tax is a flat cash charge rather than a percentage, its weight relative to a home's price varies enormously. Expressed as a share of the borough's median sale price, the annual Band D bill runs like this:
| Borough | Band D | 2025 median | Band D as % of price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westminster | £1,049.55 | £865,000 | 0.12% |
| Kensington and Chelsea | £1,666.65 | £1,150,000 | 0.14% |
| Wandsworth | £1,028.21 | £647,505 | 0.16% |
| Kingston upon Thames | £2,609.20 | £550,000 | 0.47% |
| Barking and Dagenham | £2,198.51 | £380,000 | 0.58% |
| Croydon | £2,599.91 | £425,000 | 0.61% |
A Croydon buyer pays roughly five times as much council tax per pound of purchase price as a Westminster buyer. The annual charge is a far larger line in the budget of a cheaper home than of a prime one. This is the same "cheap to buy, dear to run" divergence that shows up across the cheapest and most expensive council tax areas in England — London simply contains both extremes inside one city.
Why the two run apart
Two structural features of English council tax explain most of the inversion.
1. Bands still rest on 1991 values. Every English home's council tax band reflects its estimated open-market value on 1 April 1991, not today's price (gov.uk). The top band, H, begins at a 1991 value of just £320,000. Because the scale was never revalued, a £1.15m home today and a £340k home today can sit in the same top band — the ladder simply does not stretch to reflect the modern spread of prices. Council tax therefore compresses at the top: the most valuable homes cannot be charged proportionately more, because the band structure has no room above Band H.
2. Band D is a stack of precepts, and inner boroughs stack a smaller own-charge. A London Band D bill is built from the borough's own charge, an adult social care precept, and the Greater London Authority precept — the GLA element is set at the same Band D level across all 33 billing areas, so it is not the source of the spread. The difference comes from the borough's own charge. Inner-London authorities such as Wandsworth and Westminster combine a dense commercial rating base with historically low borough precepts, which lets them set a low Band D. Outer boroughs such as Kingston, Croydon and Harrow fund the full range of local services — including social care — from a thinner commercial base, which pushes their Band D higher. The referendum cap on annual rises (broadly a few per cent without a local vote) keeps these gaps slow-moving from year to year.
None of this is a verdict on value for money — a lower Band D does not mean better services, and a higher one does not mean worse. It reflects each authority's tax base and precept history.
What it means for a buyer's monthly maths
The headline takeaway is that in London, purchase price is a poor guide to running cost. The two biggest recurring line items — the mortgage and the council tax — do not track each other, so comparing boroughs on asking price alone misses a charge that can differ by more than £1,500 a year at Band D between, say, Wandsworth and Kingston.
You can see both figures side by side for any address on Homecost. Try a Westminster postcode such as SW1A 1AA to see how a prime-London home's council tax compares with its price, then run a borough at the other end of the table. For the wider picture of how the capital's prices are split, see inner vs outer London house prices, and for the mechanics of the tax itself, how council tax bands work. More borough-level breakdowns sit in the regional prices section.
Based on 78,876 HM Land Registry transactions completed in London in 2025 and 2026-27 Band D figures for all 33 boroughs from gov.uk.
This article is general information, not financial, tax or legal advice. Council tax bands are assigned by the Valuation Office Agency and the charge is set by your billing authority; your liability depends on your property's band and circumstances. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.