Cheapest UK Cities to Rent in 2026 (Live Data)

TL;DR

In October 2026 the cheapest place to rent in the UK was Burnley, at a median asking rent of £625 a month for homes of all sizes (332 live listings). By size, Grimsby was cheapest for a 1-bed (£500) and a 3-bed (£700), and Hartlepool for a 2-bed (£600). Of the 18 London boroughs and areas we track, Croydon was the cheapest at £1,610. Measured against local pay, rent takes the largest share in London — the ONS average rent paid there is 70.4% of residents' median gross pay — and the smallest in Hartlepool, at 23.2%. The live tables on the UK rental index update as new listings come in.

Updated 19 October 2026: every figure in this guide was rebuilt from October 2026 data as it stood on 19 October, with the same method and checks as the UK rental index, replacing the April 2026 snapshot it was first written from. Two things changed. First, since 14 October 2026 a listing we haven't seen for 14 days counts as removed; before that, every listing seen since March still counted, which is why the first version of this guide reported 182,919 "active" listings and today's count is 125,364 live listings across 214 places, rooms included. 203 of those places have an all-sizes asking rent that passes the checks for ranking, and 212 have an ONS rent figure. The two counts are not comparable. Second, rent as a share of pay now uses the ONS figure for rents being paid, as Dwellio's city pages do, rather than asking rents. How Dwellio measures rent explains both.

If you are a renter trying to work out where your money goes furthest, the right question is not just "what is the rent" but "what does the rent take from local pay, and how many homes are on offer". This guide answers both with October 2026 figures: the cheapest places for each size of home, the places where rent takes the smallest and largest share of local pay, the cheapest London boroughs, and where the rents tenants pay rose fastest.

How We Got the Numbers

Dwellio collects rental listings around the clock from six UK property sites: Rightmove, OpenRent, OnTheMarket, SpareRoom, PrimeLocation and Leaders. Each figure below is the median asking rent of the live whole-home listings in a place — homes seen in the last 14 days — computed on 19 October 2026 for October 2026. SpareRoom lists rooms, so it feeds room figures only, never the whole-home medians here. A home advertised on two sites is counted on each.

Every figure passes the same checks as the UK rental index before it is ranked:

• A size of home is ranked only with at least 30 live listings of that size.
• A place's all-sizes figure must sit between its 1-, 2- and 3-bed figures. Exeter's didn't in October — large student houses dominate its listings — so Exeter is left out of the all-sizes ranking.
• A 2- or 3-bed figure more than 5% below a smaller size's figure is left out of that ranking. Plymouth's 3-bed (£706 a month, against £950 for its 2-bed) is the October example.
• There are no studio figures: bedroom counts we can't read are stored as zero, which lets whole flats into the studio median.

Rent as a share of local pay — rent-to-income — is the ONS average monthly rent paid in the area (ONS Price Index of Private Rents, August 2026) multiplied by 12 and divided by the median gross annual pay of the area's residents (ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, Table 8.7a). It is the same figure each city page shows. 114 places in England and Wales have both figures. The other 98 places with an ONS rent have no matching pay figure in our data yet, every Scottish town and the London boroughs among them. The ONS publishes Northern Ireland rents for wider rental areas, but we don't hold them for our Northern Ireland towns yet.

Cheapest UK Cities to Rent (October 2026)

The 15 cheapest places to rent in the UK, by median asking rent for homes of all sizes, are all in the north of England and Scotland. Burnley tops the table at £625 a month, and three places tie at £650. Rent-to-income is shown where the ONS has a pay figure to compare.

Aberdeen, Scarborough, Halifax, Stockton-on-Tees and Dumfries are level with Huddersfield at £750.

Cheap is not the same as easy to find. Hull, Huddersfield and Middlesbrough each had more than 650 live listings at a median of £750 or less, so a renter there has choice as well as price; so did Aberdeen, level at £750 just outside the table. Redcar, Barrow-in-Furness and Ayr are cheap on far thinner markets.

Cheapest Places to Rent by Size

The all-sizes median mixes flats with family houses, so the cheapest place for the home you need can be somewhere else. These are the 10 cheapest places for each size, each on at least 30 live listings of that size. Pick any size and region in the live cheapest-places table.

Cheapest places to rent a 1-bed

Cheapest places to rent a 2-bed

Barnsley, Blackpool, Scunthorpe, Perth and Ayr are level with Hull at £750.

Cheapest places to rent a 3-bed

Grimsby is the cheapest place in the UK for both a 1-bed and a 3-bed, and Lincoln stands out for depth: a £550 1-bed median on 521 live listings, the biggest 1-bed market in the table by some distance.

Most Expensive UK Cities to Rent (Outside London)

Outside London, the most expensive places to rent are in London's commuter belt and the Oxford–Cambridge arc, with Bristol the one exception. St Albans has the highest median asking rent at £1,925 a month for homes of all sizes. London as a whole sits above all of them at £2,300 (4,821 live listings) — the boroughs are below.

Harlow is level with Cambridge at £1,600. A dash means fewer than 30 live listings of that size, so no figure is ranked.

Cheapest London Boroughs to Rent (October 2026)

Of the 18 London boroughs and areas Dwellio tracks, Croydon is the cheapest to rent in, at a median asking rent of £1,610 a month for homes of all sizes, and the cheapest for a 1-bed (£1,400, level with Bromley) and a 2-bed (£1,750). Bromley is the cheapest for a 3-bed at £2,225, on 57 live 3-bed listings. Westminster is the most expensive of the 18 at £3,900. Each size figure rests on at least 30 live listings of that size.

Hammersmith and Fulham are one borough; Dwellio tracks them as two areas, each with its own page. Several boroughs, among them Kensington and Chelsea, Barnet, Richmond upon Thames and Sutton, aren't tracked as their own areas yet, so they are not in the table. The London boroughs table on the London rent page keeps these figures current.

Where Rent Takes the Most of Local Pay

Absolute rent only matters in proportion to what people earn. The conventional affordability line is 30% of gross income spent on housing; above it, rent starts to crowd out everything else. Here rent-to-income is the ONS average rent paid in an area as a share of what its residents earn. In England and Wales it covers every tenancy, new and old, not just the homes on the market now, so it is a different series from the asking rents above.

Every place in the 15 highest is in the south or east of England, apart from Manchester.

Three notes on reading it. The ONS figure is for the local authority that covers each place, so Bath's is Bath and North East Somerset's and Brighton's is Brighton and Hove's. ASHE pay is for people who live in the area, wherever they work, so commuters who earn in a richer city lift their home area's pay figure. And the figure is before tax: the share of take-home pay is higher still.

Where Renters Keep the Most of Their Salary

At the other end, every place in the 15 lowest is in the north of England, the Midlands or Wales. Rugby is the outlier: its ONS average rent of £1,049 is high for this list, but residents' median pay of £41,814 keeps the share at 30.1%.

The rent and pay tables on the UK rental index carry the same figures and update when the ONS publishes.

Where Rents Rose Most: Rent Increase by Area

The ONS figures for rents tenants are paying rose 4.1% in the year to August 2026, averaged over the ONS areas of the 212 cities Dwellio tracks. The biggest rises were in Kirklees, which covers Huddersfield and Dewsbury (up 12.8%), Oldham (12.5%), Wolverhampton, Bolton and Redditch (11.1% each), and Folkestone and Hythe (10.6%). Rents paid fell in 8 of the 186 ONS areas, most in Wyre Forest, which covers Kidderminster (down 2.4%), Merthyr Tydfil and Woking (both down 1.6%). In England and Wales these are ONS figures for rents being paid on new and existing tenancies, not asking rents; the ONS says its Scottish figures are still mostly for newly advertised lets; the rent rises table on the UK rental index lists every area alongside Dwellio's own month-on-month asking-rent change, which returns with November's figures.

Portal Coverage Shifts by City

Which sites carry the listings varies a lot from city to city. Of the listings Dwellio collected in October 2026 in four places:

In Hull, Bath and Hartlepool, Rightmove supplied the most listings, with OpenRent, OnTheMarket and PrimeLocation each a strong second somewhere. London is different: OpenRent, which lists many homes let directly by their landlords, supplied three in every four of the London listings we collected.

Two cautions before reading too much into the numbers. In big cities we read a fixed number of result pages on each site, so these counts show what each site added to our sample, not how many homes each site lists. And a home on two sites is counted on each. These counts include SpareRoom's rooms; the live-listing counts in the rent tables above are whole homes only, which is why Hull is 906 there and 990 here. The practical point survives both: no single site carries every rental, and in London the gap is widest. Our alternatives to Rightmove guide goes deeper into what each site carries. SpareRoom's listings are rooms in shared houses, so they complement rather than overlap the whole-home sites.

Broadband That Comes With the Rent

For tenants who work from home, broadband is part of the housing budget. Ofcom's full fibre coverage figure is the cleanest way to compare cities, because full fibre delivers gigabit speeds at lower cost than legacy copper.

Hull is the UK's standout broadband city because of KCOM, the local network operator that built out fibre years before BT Openreach reached most other regions. Oxford is the surprise: in one of the most expensive cities to rent in the UK, only four in ten premises have full fibre. The legacy copper network there is unusually persistent because of Conservation Area planning rules and listed-building constraints across the city centre.

Energy Efficiency by City

Energy Performance Certificate ratings are a proxy for running cost. A C-rated home in 2026 costs roughly 30% less to heat than a D-rated equivalent, and the gap widens for E and F. Since May 2026, with rent in advance capped at one month, tenants can no longer offset a leaky property with a chunky upfront cheque, so the running cost matters more than it used to.

Cambridge tops the table because a large share of its rental stock is recent build-to-rent and student-targeted accommodation built to current insulation standards. Birmingham at the bottom reflects the city's older Victorian and inter-war housing stock, much of it pre-cavity-wall insulation. Tenants in lower-rated cities should ask for the certificate during the viewing and budget an extra £40 to £80 a month on heating in winter for a D-rated property versus a C.

What This Means For Renters Since May 2026

In England, the Renters' Rights Act 2025 changed two of the levers a tenant can pull in a competitive search on 1 May 2026. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own renting laws.

First, the bidding ban took price out of the contest. Landlords and letting agents must not ask for, encourage or accept an offer above the advertised rent, and councils can fine them up to £7,000. In high-demand places such as London, Bath or Brighton, speed of enquiry, application quality and flexibility on viewing times are what is left to compete on. Our Renters' Rights Act guide for tenants covers the full set of changes.

Second, landlords can no longer take any rent before the tenancy agreement is signed, and after signing they can ask for only the first month's rent (28 days' if you pay weekly) before the tenancy starts, so paying six or twelve months up front to make up for weak credit, no UK guarantor or self-employed income is off the table. In the places where rent takes the biggest share of pay, more renters now compete on the same terms; in the most affordable places, that lever was less needed in the first place.

The combined effect is that the renter who sees a listing first and applies first now wins more often than the renter who is willing to pay more.

How to Use This Data

If you are choosing where to look, the rent-to-income tables are the more honest ones. London's £2,300 median asking rent says little on its own; the ONS figure — rent at 70.4% of residents' median gross pay — says a single earner on local median pay is stretched before council tax, transport or food.

To check your own salary against a city, the rent affordability calculator applies the 30 times income check most letting agents use, and 30% of your take-home pay, then counts the homes listed at or under the result in that city right now.

If you are already searching, the size tables are the practical ones. An alert set for the size you need, capped at the local median, tells you about the typical home in that place the moment it is listed. Every city page shows its rents by size and, where the ONS has the figures, the share of local pay that goes on rent.

Dwellio monitors all six sites continuously and alerts you within minutes of a matching listing on any of them. With the bidding ban in force since 1 May 2026, getting alerts faster is the cheapest legal advantage left in the system. Dwellio is free to sign up — no card needed. The 7-day free trial, when you upgrade, takes a card — cancel anytime before it ends and you won't be charged. After that it is £9.99 a month.

Set up your first alert — pick a place and a size from the tables above, and Dwellio watches every new listing for you.

Methodology and Sources

• Rental listings and median asking rents: Dwellio's continuous collection from Rightmove, OpenRent, OnTheMarket, SpareRoom, PrimeLocation and Leaders; October 2026 figures, computed on 19 October 2026. A live listing is one seen in the last 14 days. Each site's advert is counted, so a home on two sites counts twice; see how Dwellio measures rent.
• Rents paid and annual change: Office for National Statistics, Price Index of Private Rents, August 2026, for the local authority (or wider ONS area) that covers each place.
• Pay: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025 residence-based median pay, Table 8.7a.
• Broadband: Ofcom Connected Nations 2025, local authority level.
• EPC ratings: MHCLG Energy Performance of Buildings Register, city-level aggregation of all live certificates.
• The live tables: the UK rental index carries every table above, updated as listings come in, and the whole table is a free CSV download under CC BY 4.0.

Every place has its own page with rents by size, the ONS rent trend and live listings — see the average rent in Burnley, rent prices in Hull, the average rent in Hartlepool, Croydon rents, Manchester and London.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cheapest place to rent in the UK?

Burnley is the cheapest place to rent in the UK, with a median asking rent of £625 a month for homes of all sizes, from 332 live listings in October 2026. By size, Grimsby is cheapest for a 1-bed at £500 a month and for a 3-bed at £700, and Hartlepool for a 2-bed at £600. Each figure rests on at least 30 live listings of that size, and the live table on the Dwellio UK rental index updates as new listings come in.

What is the cheapest place to rent in London?

Of the 18 London boroughs and areas Dwellio tracks, Croydon is the cheapest to rent in, with a median asking rent of £1,610 a month for homes of all sizes, from 1,409 live listings in October 2026. Croydon is also cheapest for a 1-bed at £1,400 (level with Bromley) and a 2-bed at £1,750, while Bromley is cheapest for a 3-bed at £2,225. Westminster is the most expensive of the 18, at £3,900 a month.

Where is rent highest compared with wages?

London, where the ONS average rent paid, £2,332 a month in August 2026, is 70.4% of residents' median gross pay of £39,778 a year (ONS ASHE 2025). Bath at 69.6%, Bristol at 66.4%, Brighton at 64.8% and Oxford at 64.5% follow. Rent takes the smallest share of local pay in Hartlepool, at 23.2%.

Does Rightmove list every rental in London?

No single site lists every London rental. In October 2026 OpenRent supplied 3,548 of the 4,714 London listings Dwellio collected and Rightmove 855, a far bigger OpenRent share than anywhere else we track. In big cities Dwellio reads a fixed number of result pages on each site, so these counts show what each site added to our sample rather than how many homes it lists, but they point the same way: a renter searching one site in London misses a large share of what is on offer. Outside London the pattern flips: in Hull, Bath and Hartlepool, Rightmove supplied the most listings.

Which UK city has the best fibre broadband for renters?

Hull has 99.8% full fibre coverage of all premises, the highest in the UK. This is a legacy of KCOM, which built out fibre in Hull years before BT Openreach reached most other cities. Hartlepool follows at 95.2%, then Leeds at 92.5% and Glasgow at 91.5%. Oxford is the worst-served large city we track at 40.1% full fibre coverage.

Which UK cities have the most energy-efficient rental stock?

Cambridge has the highest share of EPC A-to-C rated dwellings at 58.6%, ahead of Manchester at 54.6% and Oxford at 51.8%. London sits at 51.8%. Birmingham is the lowest of the major cities we track at 39.9%. EPC band A-to-C properties typically carry lower running costs, which matters more from May 2026 because tenants can no longer offset higher rents with multi-month rent in advance.

How often is this data updated?

The tables in this guide are the October 2026 figures, computed on 19 October 2026. The same tables on the Dwellio UK rental index are rebuilt as new listings come in, from continuous collection across six UK property sites, and a month's final figures are the ones from its last day. The ONS rent and pay figures are refreshed when the ONS publishes them: monthly for rents, yearly for pay. Broadband and EPC figures are refreshed annually from Ofcom and the EPC register.