What salary do you need to buy a house in the UK?
Buying a home rarely comes down to the asking price alone. Lenders decide what you can borrow from your income, and that figure — not the sticker price — is what most often sets the ceiling on where you can buy.
Across England and Wales, the typical home sold for a median of £295,000 in 2025 (759,637 standard transactions, HM Land Registry Price Paid data, figures fetched 5 August 2026). With a 10% deposit and mortgage borrowing capped at the widely used 4.5-times-income limit, that points to a household income of around £59,000 to buy the average home. In Sunderland, where the median was £155,000, the same maths points to about £31,000. In Kensington & Chelsea, where the median was £1.15m, it is roughly £230,000 — more than seven times the Sunderland figure.
Here is how lenders get from a salary to a mortgage offer, and the household income behind the typical home in a range of UK cities.
How lenders decide what you can borrow
Two rules do most of the work.
1. The loan-to-income (LTI) cap. The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee limits how much a lender can advance at 4.5 times income or more: no more than 15% of a lender's new mortgages may cross that ratio. In practice that makes around 4.5× income the working ceiling for most borrowers. Some lenders offer more — 5 or 5.5 times income for higher earners or specific schemes — and some less. For a joint application, the multiple applies to your combined income.
2. The affordability check. Separately, Financial Conduct Authority rules require lenders to test whether you could still afford the repayments if your circumstances or interest rates changed. Regular outgoings — childcare, loans, credit commitments — are counted too. Because of this, the amount actually offered is often below the 4.5× ceiling.
So the rough sum a buyer can work with is:
Maximum mortgage ≈ 4.5 × household income.
Income needed ≈ (purchase price − deposit) ÷ 4.5.
The bigger the deposit, the smaller the mortgage — and the lower the income a lender needs to see.
The salary behind the average home, city by city
The table applies the 4.5× cap to the 2025 median sale price in each area (HM Land Registry standard-category sales of detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat homes). It shows the household income implied with a 10% deposit and with a 25% deposit. Figures are rounded and illustrative.
| Area | Typical price (2025) | 10% deposit | Income at 10% deposit | Income at 25% deposit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom (median) | £295,000 | £29,500 | £59,000 | £49,200 |
| Sunderland | £155,000 | £15,500 | £31,000 | £25,800 |
| Liverpool | £182,000 | £18,200 | £36,400 | £30,300 |
| Nottingham | £200,000 | £20,000 | £40,000 | £33,300 |
| Sheffield | £217,500 | £21,750 | £43,500 | £36,300 |
| Birmingham | £237,000 | £23,700 | £47,400 | £39,500 |
| Leeds | £247,500 | £24,750 | £49,500 | £41,300 |
| Manchester | £250,000 | £25,000 | £50,000 | £41,700 |
| Cardiff | £270,000 | £27,000 | £54,000 | £45,000 |
| Bristol | £350,000 | £35,000 | £70,000 | £58,300 |
| London (all boroughs) | £530,000 | £53,000 | £106,000 | £88,300 |
| Westminster | £875,000 | £87,500 | £175,000 | £145,800 |
| Kensington & Chelsea | £1,150,000 | £115,000 | £230,000 | £191,700 |
Two things stand out.
- The deposit does heavy lifting. In Manchester (£250,000 median), the income implied by a 10% deposit is about £50,000; with a 25% deposit it falls to roughly £41,700. A larger deposit shrinks the loan — and the income a lender needs to see — pound for pound.
- Geography dwarfs everything else. The income behind the typical London home (about £106,000 at a 10% deposit) is roughly double Manchester's, and the Kensington & Chelsea figure is about 7.4 times Sunderland's. The average house price in London and the Manchester postcode breakdown show how wide that gap has grown, and the mid-table cities — Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool — cluster the typical buyer between about £36,000 and £50,000.
What that means each month
Income tells you whether a lender will approve the loan; the monthly payment tells you whether it is comfortable. Take Manchester's £250,000 median with a 25% deposit (£62,500). The £187,500 mortgage, over 25 years at the Bank of England's latest quoted 75% loan-to-value five-year fixed rate of 4.32% (1 April 2026), works out at about £1,023 a month in capital and interest.
You can change the price, deposit, rate and term in the mortgage repayment calculator, or work backwards from a salary in the mortgage affordability calculator. To see what a given salary leaves after tax, the take-home pay calculator does the PAYE and National Insurance sums. For the full monthly picture of one price point — mortgage, council tax, energy and the rest — the walkthrough of the true cost of buying a £300,000 home sets out every line item.
One caveat on rates: the 4.32% figure is specifically a 75% LTV deal — that is, a 25% deposit. A 10% deposit means a 90% LTV mortgage, which typically carries a higher rate, so a smaller-deposit buyer would usually pay more each month than a rate-matched 25%-deposit buyer. Your own rate depends on your lender, deposit, term and credit profile.
Why the deposit changes the whole picture
Two buyers on the same salary can end up able to buy very differently priced homes, purely on the size of their deposit. A household earning £50,000 could support a mortgage of around £225,000 at 4.5× income. With a 10% deposit that reaches a home of about £250,000; with a 25% deposit the same mortgage stretches to roughly £300,000 — because a bigger deposit adds to the loan rather than replacing income.
That is why the deposit, not just the salary, decides which cities open up. How much you need, and how long it takes to save across different markets, is covered in how much deposit you need to buy a house and the deposit gap between the cheapest and dearest cities to save in. Buying with someone else changes the arithmetic again, because the 4.5× multiple applies to combined income — the joint-applicant affordability maths works through how two incomes stack up.
To ground the numbers in a real place, you can look up the all-in monthly cost of the homes on any street with the postcode cost tool — the example opens central Manchester.
The numbers behind this article
Prices are the median of HM Land Registry Price Paid transactions for 2025 (standard-category sales of detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat/maisonette homes), fetched on 5 August 2026 — 759,637 sales nationally. The 4.5× loan-to-income figure follows the Bank of England Financial Policy Committee's LTI limit; the 4.32% mortgage rate is the Bank of England's latest quoted 75% LTV five-year fix. Browse more cost-of-buying guides or all Homecost articles.
These figures are general information, not financial advice. What you can actually borrow depends on your lender, deposit, income, outgoings and credit history, and mortgage rates change over time. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.