Kensington house prices: £1.26m average, down 10.7%

Kensington and Chelsea is still the most expensive borough in the country to buy a home in, and it is also the one falling fastest. The average sale completed in the borough in May 2026 came in at £1,255,567, which is 10.7% lower than a year earlier. Over the same twelve months prices across England as a whole rose 2.3%.

Both numbers come from the UK House Price Index, which is built from completed HM Land Registry sales rather than asking prices. Everything below is from that dataset unless stated otherwise.

The headline figures

The gap is enormous in both directions. A Kensington and Chelsea average is more than four times the England average, and about £700,000 clear of the average for London as a whole. It is also, along with Westminster, one of the two boroughs where the fall over the past year runs into double figures while the national figure is positive.

That combination is worth understanding before you read anything into it. The borough records only a few dozen to a few hundred completed sales a month, and the mix of what sells swings the average hard. A quiet quarter for £5 million houses in Chelsea and a busier one for flats in North Kensington will move the headline number a long way without any individual home changing in value.

What you pay by property type

The single most useful number on this page for most people is not the headline. It is the £1,000,463 average for a flat or maisonette, because that is the market almost everyone buying in the borough is actually in. Houses of any kind are a small and very expensive minority of what changes hands here.

The house figures show why the borough average behaves the way it does. A detached house averaged £4,492,408, a semi-detached £2,942,399 and a terrace £2,367,693. There are not many detached houses in Kensington and Chelsea, and when a handful sell in a given month they pull the whole average up.

First-time buyers and movers

The same dataset splits buyers rather than buildings. In May 2026 a first-time buyer in the borough paid an average of £1,077,471, and a former owner occupier paid £1,489,278.

A first-time buyer average above a million pounds is the plainest measure of what this borough is. It is roughly four and a half times the England-wide first-time buyer average of £244,288. Anyone buying their first home in Kensington, Chelsea or Notting Hill on an ordinary salary is, in practice, buying with help or buying a share.

How far prices have come down

The borough’s house price index reading was 85.2 in May 2026. The index is set to 100 for January 2023, so the average sale in the borough is running around 15% below where it was three and a half years ago. The month-by-month path over the past year has been consistently negative:

The annual fall has widened every month since the autumn. That is partly the market and partly arithmetic: the comparison months in 2025 were themselves strong, so each new month is measured against a higher base.

What it means if you live here

If you are selling, the borough is not a place where an asking price sets itself. Prices completing now are below prices completing a year ago across the board, and the fall is steeper at the top of the market than at the flat end.

If you are buying, the fall is real but it is a fall from an extraordinary level. A million pounds still buys a flat, not a house, in most of the borough. It is worth checking the council tax band on anything you view, and the parking permit cost if you keep a car, because both are running costs that survive whatever the market does.

If you are staying put, nothing on this page is a loss until you sell.

A warning about postcodes

Kensington and Chelsea is a small borough with leaky edges, and this matters whenever you read a “Kensington” price figure that is not borough-based. Of the nine postcode districts that cover the borough, only W8 and SW5 sit wholly inside it. SW3, SW7 and SW1X are shared with Westminster; SW10 and W14 with Hammersmith and Fulham; W11 with Westminster, Ealing and Hammersmith and Fulham; and W10 with five boroughs.

So a postcode-level average labelled Kensington or Chelsea will usually contain sales that are legally in another borough. The figures on this page are the local-authority ones, which do not have that problem.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average house price in Kensington and Chelsea?

£1,255,567 for sales completing in May 2026, according to the provisional UK House Price Index. That covers every property type across the whole borough.

Are Kensington house prices falling?

Yes. Prices were down 10.7% in the year to May 2026, and the annual fall has widened in each of the last several months. England as a whole rose 2.3% over the same period.

How much is a flat in Kensington and Chelsea?

An average of £1,000,463 in May 2026. Flats and maisonettes are the bulk of what sells in the borough, so this figure is closer to most buyers’ reality than the headline average is.

Is Kensington and Chelsea the most expensive borough in London?

On average sale price, yes. At £1,255,567 it is well ahead of the City of Westminster at £836,331 and Camden at £805,837, the next two highest of the boroughs checked here.

Where can I check what a specific house sold for?

Every completed sale in England and Wales is public. Search a street or an address for free on the HM Land Registry Price Paid service.

Sources

• UK House Price Index, Kensington and Chelsea (ONS and HM Land Registry) for the borough average, property-type and buyer-type figures and the monthly series.
• Land Registry UKHPI open data for the comparator boroughs, London and England figures.
• HM Land Registry Price Paid search to check any individual address.

Figures are provisional and are revised as more sales complete. Confirm the latest numbers against the linked sources before making any decision.