The typical Oxford home sold for £450,000 in the year to June 2026, but ward medians run from £315,000 in Northfield Brook to £825,000 in Walton Manor.
Oxford is a small city with a very large price range inside it. The city average tells you almost nothing useful, because a four-mile drive from Greater Leys to north Oxford roughly triples what a house costs.
This page uses two official sources and keeps them separate. The first is the UK House Price Index, which is the government’s own average for the whole city and the number to quote when you want the trend. The second is HM Land Registry Price Paid data, the record of every completed sale, which we have read ward by ward so the numbers describe your actual neighbourhood rather than a city that stretches from Cutteslowe to Blackbird Leys.
The headline figure
The average Oxford home sold for £473,467 in May 2026, the most recent month published in the UK House Price Index, and that is up 2.2% over the year.
Two comparisons put that in context.
Against the county, Oxford is the most expensive of Oxfordshire’s five districts. South Oxfordshire is next at £470,720, then West Oxfordshire at £417,246, the Vale of White Horse at £407,966 and Cherwell at £357,800. The Oxfordshire average is £418,038, so a home inside the city costs about £55,000 more than the county norm.
Against the country, the gap is much wider. The England average in the same month was £292,095. Oxford is 62% above it.
Against its own record, the city is still working back. Oxford peaked at £517,061 in September 2024. The May 2026 average is £43,594, or 8.4%, below that peak, even though the annual change has turned positive again.
One warning about the monthly figure. Oxford’s index swings hard with the season. Each of the last four years peaked in September or October and bottomed out between January and June, a swing of £27,000 to £58,000 within the same year. Compare May with May, not May with last September.
What it means for you
If you are buying, the useful number is not the city average but the ward median further down this page. The type of home matters less here than where it is: a terraced house in Blackbird Leys and a terraced house in Walton Manor are the same building type and three times apart in price.
If you are selling, the market is rising modestly again but is not back at 2024 levels. Semi-detached houses are doing best, up 3.6% over the year, and terraces are up 2.9%. Flats are the exception, down 0.8%, and Oxford has a lot of them.
If you are a first-time buyer, the average first purchase in the city was £407,059 in May 2026, up 2.5% over the year. That is more than the England average for a home of any kind.
Prices by property type
These are city averages for May 2026 from the UK House Price Index, with the annual change alongside:
- Detached houses: £959,572, up 2.6%.
- Semi-detached houses: £585,170, up 3.6%. The strongest category.
- Terraced houses: £463,370, up 2.9%. Oxford’s most-traded type.
- Flats and maisonettes: £289,098, down 0.8%. The only category falling.
The same data splits buyers rather than buildings. A first-time buyer paid an average of £407,059, a home mover £577,777.
What each part of Oxford actually sells for
This is where the city average stops being useful.
The table below is our own analysis of 1,223 residential sales in Oxford that completed between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, taken from HM Land Registry Price Paid data. Every sale’s postcode was checked against the Office for National Statistics boundary lookup, so only sales genuinely inside the city are counted, and each one is placed in its own council ward. It shows the median, the middle sale, which is not distorted by one large north Oxford house the way an average is.
The city median over that period was £450,000, which is exactly the median ONS reports for Oxford over its own twelve-month window, so the two independent readings agree.
| Ward | Main places | Median sold price | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walton Manor | North Oxford between Woodstock and Banbury Roads | £825,000 | 36 |
| Cutteslowe & Sunnymead | Cutteslowe, Sunnymead, upper Banbury Road | £780,000 | 91 |
| Summertown | Summertown shops and the streets behind them | £777,500 | 62 |
| Carfax & Jericho | The city centre, Jericho and Walton Street | £660,000 | 17 |
| St Mary's | Iffley Road, Cowley Place, the Plain | £654,875 | 53 |
| Rose Hill & Iffley | Iffley village and Rose Hill | £609,000 | 28 |
| St Clement's | St Clement's, Marston Road, Divinity Road | £557,500 | 54 |
| Headington | Headington centre, Old Headington, the hospitals | £547,500 | 75 |
| Wolvercote | Wolvercote, Cutteslowe Park edge, Godstow Road | £525,000 | 71 |
| Hinksey Park | South of Folly Bridge, Abingdon Road, New Hinksey | £465,000 | 73 |
| Headington Hill & Northway | Headington Hill, Northway, New Marston edge | £455,000 | 41 |
| Marston | Old and New Marston | £450,000 | 56 |
| Donnington | Iffley Fields, Donnington, Magdalen Road | £445,000 | 56 |
| Quarry & Risinghurst | Headington Quarry, Risinghurst, Sandhills edge | £435,000 | 71 |
| Osney & St Thomas | Osney Island, Botley Road, St Thomas | £430,000 | 64 |
| Lye Valley | Wood Farm, Lye Valley, Girdlestone Road | £415,000 | 49 |
| Cowley | Cowley centre and Between Towns Road | £405,000 | 51 |
| Temple Cowley | Temple Cowley, Oxford Road, the plant edge | £400,000 | 62 |
| Churchill | Church Cowley, Cowley Marsh, Hollow Way | £390,000 | 39 |
| Littlemore | Littlemore and Sandford Road | £375,000 | 62 |
| Barton & Sandhills | Barton, Barton Park, Sandhills | £361,000 | 50 |
| Blackbird Leys | Blackbird Leys, Knights Road | £340,000 | 34 |
| Northfield Brook | Greater Leys, Blackbird Leys south | £315,000 | 28 |
The gap is not just about the type of house
The easy explanation for a ward gap is the mix: leafy wards sell detached houses, estates sell flats and terraces, and a median just mixes them together.
In Oxford that explanation does not survive contact with the data. Compare the same building type across the city and the gap barely narrows:
| Ward | Terraced | Semi-detached | Flats as a share of sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walton Manor | £1,037,500 | £1,495,000 | 44% |
| Summertown | £937,500 | £965,000 | 44% |
| Headington | £507,500 | £620,000 | 27% |
| Blackbird Leys | £345,000 | £340,000 | 3% |
A terraced house in Walton Manor sells for three times what the same description sells for in Blackbird Leys. That is a location premium, not a building premium, and it is why the ward table above is the part of this page worth bookmarking.
Two other numbers from the same 1,223 sales are worth knowing. The lower quartile was £360,000 and the upper quartile £640,000, so half of all Oxford sales landed between those two figures. And 96 sales, one in every 13, went for £1m or more.
Can people who work in Oxford afford Oxford?
Mostly not, and the city council says so in its own planning documents. The submission draft Local Plan 2045 states plainly that “Oxford is one of the least affordable places in the country”, and puts the need for affordable homes at 692 a year, of which 446 are for households who can afford neither to buy nor to rent privately.
The official measure bears that out without being quite as dramatic as the reputation. On the ONS housing affordability data for 2025, the median Oxford home cost 10.34 times the median gross annual pay of a full-time job based in the city (£43,502). That is the 77th least affordable of 317 districts in England and Wales, and the highest ratio in Oxfordshire: Cherwell is 9.29, West Oxfordshire 9.88 and the Vale of White Horse 8.91. The England figure is 7.6.
The reason Oxford is not higher up that national list is that it also has unusually well-paid work in it, at the universities, the hospitals and the science parks. Measured against what residents earn rather than what local jobs pay, the ratio is 10.40 and Oxford rises to 46th of 316.
How we did this, and what we left out
Oxford has no postcode district that belongs to the city alone. OX1, OX2, OX3 and OX4 are all shared with a neighbouring council, so a postcode-based average is not an Oxford average. We pulled every Land Registry sale in those four outcodes and checked each postcode against the ONS lookup. That removed 209 sales in the Vale of White Horse (Botley, Kennington, North Hinksey and Cumnor, which have OX1 and OX2 addresses but are not in the city) and 20 in South Oxfordshire. Their median, £488,000, is higher than the city’s, so leaving them in would have flattered Oxford by about £20,000.
Land Registry data records the price actually paid on completion. It excludes right-to-buy discounts recorded at less than market value, commercial property and most new-build sales that had not completed by the end of June 2026.
Also on The Oxford Post
- Oxford planning news: the Local Plan 2045, the housing target and the sites allocated for homes.
- Oxford trains to London: journey times and what a season ticket costs.
- Oxford roadworks and travel: Botley Road, the traffic filters and park and ride.
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