Richmond upon Thames house prices in 2026: outer London's outlier

Richmond upon Thames recorded a median sale price of £720,000 across 2,527 residential transactions in 2025, according to HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. That makes it the fifth-dearest of London's 33 boroughs — and the only borough outside inner London to reach the capital's top five.

The four boroughs above it are all in inner London: Kensington & Chelsea (£1,150,000), Westminster (£865,000), the City of London (£790,000, on a very thin residential sample) and Camden (£770,000). Below Richmond sit nine of the 13 inner-London boroughs, including Hammersmith & Fulham (£700,000), Wandsworth (£647,505) and Islington (£640,250). On the price data, the Inner/Outer London boundary is an administrative line, not a price contour — and Richmond is the clearest example of that.

*City of London residential sales are few (142) and dominated by flats.

Richmond's position is set out in more detail in our guide to inner versus outer London house prices, where the borough is the standout exception to the usual inner-costs-more rule.

The average sits far above the typical sale

Richmond's mean sale price in 2025 was £926,732 — more than £200,000 above its median. That £206,732 gap is the fingerprint of a prime riverside tail: a cluster of very high-value detached homes along the Thames pulls the average upwards while the typical transaction sits well below it. The middle 50% of sales ran from £490,000 (lower quartile) to £1,115,000 (upper quartile).

For a borough like this, the median is the far better guide to what a normal purchase looks like. Where an average is quoted for Richmond, it is being lifted by a small number of exceptional sales rather than describing the market most buyers actually meet.

Detached versus flat: a 3.5× spread inside one borough

Split by property type, Richmond stretches from seven-figure detached houses down to a flat market that looks almost like a different borough.

A detached house costs roughly 3.5 times a flat. Flats were the single largest type by volume (993 sales), narrowly ahead of terraced houses (882) — Richmond is a house-heavy borough with a substantial period-flat market concentrated in Richmond town, Kew and Twickenham. That flat median of £470,000 is one of the lower entry points in dear west London, a pattern we track across the capital in our breakdown of the London flat-versus-house price gap by borough.

Where the money is: the district ladder

Within the borough, price falls steadily as you move away from the riverside and towards the western edge.

Barnes (SW13) to Hampton (TW12) is a 1.88× spread across a single borough. Note that postcode districts do not stop at borough boundaries: the Hampton Wick fringe (part of KT1) sits mostly in neighbouring Kingston upon Thames and is excluded here, and the SW and TW areas each reach into other authorities. The figures above are restricted to the transactions that fall inside the Richmond upon Thames local authority.

Council tax: dear to buy and dear to run

Richmond's Band D council tax for 2026-27 is £2,486.10 (gov.uk council tax data) — the fourth-highest of any London borough. That is unusual. Across London, the dearest boroughs to buy tend to charge the lowest Band D: Wandsworth (£1,028.21) and Westminster (£1,049.55) are the two cheapest billing authorities in all of England, yet both are among the priciest places to buy. That mismatch — high price, low council tax — is the subject of our analysis of the London council tax versus house price inversion.

Richmond breaks the pattern: it is dear on both axes. The Band D reflects an outer-London borough carrying the full adult-social-care precept on a residential rather than commercial base. Band D is a benchmark, not most people's actual bill — a Band A home pays two-thirds of it, a Band H home twice as much (Local Government Finance Act 1992).

What it costs to buy at the median

Buying at Richmond's £720,000 median carries a specific set of one-off and monthly costs. The figures below are worked examples using published rates, not quotes.

At £720,000, standard Stamp Duty Land Tax is £26,000 (an effective rate of 3.61%), charged as 2% on the slice from £125,001 to £250,000 and 5% on the slice from £250,001 to £720,000 (HMRC residential rates, 2026). First-time buyer relief is withdrawn entirely above £500,000, so a first-time buyer at Richmond's median pays the same £26,000 as anyone else. A buyer of an additional dwelling — a second home or buy-to-let — pays the 5% surcharge on the whole price on top, taking the bill to £62,000.

On the mortgage side, a 25% deposit of £180,000 leaves a £540,000 loan. 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 (Bank of England) — that works out at roughly £2,947 a month over 25 years, and around £344,000 in interest across the full term. Your own rate will depend on your lender, deposit and credit profile.

Council tax is £207 a month, or about 6.6% of that mortgage-plus-council-tax total. So while Richmond's Band D is high for London, it moves the monthly housing bill only at the margin — the mortgage does almost all the work. You can vary the deposit, rate and term with our mortgage cost calculator, or check the tax on a different price with the stamp duty calculator. This is general information, not advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.

Energy: older stock, and it shows

Of the roughly 45,800 domestic Energy Performance Certificates on record for the borough, 26.5% are rated C or above and 73.5% sit at band D or below (A 126 / B 1,009 / C 10,990 / D 20,783 / E 10,340 / F 2,125 / G 435). That is a shade below the London-wide figure of about 28.6%, and reflects Richmond's older Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian riverside stock, much of it in conservation areas where retrofit options are constrained. A tail of 5.6% sit at the lowest F and G bands. (EPC modelled running costs use dated assumptions and should be read as a directional guide to relative efficiency, not a current energy bill.)

Which way are prices moving?

The two standard measures disagree, so it is worth being careful. Richmond's raw median edged up 0.7% year on year, from £715,000 in 2024 to £720,000 in 2025. But the borough's own ONS House Price Index, which adjusts for the changing mix of homes sold, fell from 103.6 to 100.6 in the year to March 2026 — a 2.9% decline. For comparison, the London index fell 2.1% and the Outer London index 1.0% over the same period, while the UK index was essentially flat (+0.1%).

Because the raw median is sensitive to which homes happened to sell, the mix-adjusted index is the safer read on direction: broadly flat to slightly soft, rather than rising. These are published figures for the year to March 2026, not a forecast.

See the true cost for any Richmond street

Richmond's borough-wide median hides a wide spread — from Hampton flats to Barnes riverside houses. To see the all-in cost for a specific street, enter a postcode such as TW9 1AA in Kew and Homecost will show the mortgage, council tax, energy and stamp duty for every property on it. You can also browse more regional price guides or read the wider London house price picture.

Based on 2,527 HM Land Registry residential transactions in Richmond upon Thames in 2025, 2026-27 gov.uk Band D council tax, and the borough's ONS House Price Index. See how we use the data.