Hereford house prices: £286,995, up 4.7% in a year

The average home in Herefordshire sold for £286,995 in May 2026, the most recent month published by the UK House Price Index. That is 4.7 per cent more than a year earlier, and it is a faster rise than Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Powys, the West Midlands region or England as a whole managed over the same twelve months.

Herefordshire is not an expensive county by national standards. Its average is still about £5,100 below the England figure of £292,095. What has changed is the direction of travel: for most of 2024 and early 2025 prices here were flat or slightly down, and they have now pulled ahead of every neighbour.

This page sets out what the official record actually shows. The county average and how it moved, what you pay by property type, and then the part the headline figure hides: the real sold prices in Hereford, Leominster, Ross-on-Wye, Ledbury, Bromyard and Kington, taken straight from HM Land Registry’s own record of completed sales.

Herefordshire is rising faster than anywhere around it

Set against a longer run, the county has done what most of rural England has done. In May 2016 the Herefordshire average was £203,914, so homes here are worth 40.7 per cent more than ten years ago. In May 2021, before the post-pandemic surge had fully worked through, it was £238,626, making the five-year gain 20.3 per cent.

The county’s high point so far was £290,700 in October 2025. May 2026 sits 1.3 per cent below that, so this year’s 4.7 per cent rise is a recovery from a weak spring in 2025 rather than a run to a new record.

What you pay by property type

Houses have moved together and flats have not. Detached, semi-detached and terraced homes all rose between 4.8 and 5.3 per cent; flats rose 0.7 per cent, which after inflation is a fall. At £125,687 the average Herefordshire flat now costs less than a third of the average detached house, and the gap is widening every quarter.

That matters more here than it would in a city. Herefordshire has very little flatted stock outside Hereford itself, so the flat figure is built on a small number of sales and moves erratically. The semi-detached figure, £276,715, is the one that best describes an ordinary Herefordshire home.

Buyers split the way they usually do. A first-time buyer paid an average of £221,607, up 4.6 per cent on the year. Someone who already owned a home paid £352,153, up 4.8 per cent. Cash buyers averaged £297,430 and mortgaged buyers £279,496, which is the reverse of the national pattern and reflects how much of the county’s cash buying goes into larger rural property.

The real sold prices, town by town

The county average is one number covering everything from a Hereford terrace to a farmhouse on the Welsh border. To get underneath it we pulled every completed sale that HM Land Registry registered in the six Herefordshire postal towns over the twelve months to the end of June 2026, dropped the non-residential records, and took the median of what was left.

That is 2,136 residential sales. Medians rather than averages, because in a county where a single £1.2 million farmhouse can land in a town’s figures, the median is the honest description of a typical sale.

Three things come out of that table.

Ross-on-Wye and Ledbury are the expensive end of the county. A typical sale in Ross is £330,000 and in Ledbury £316,750, against £275,000 in Hereford. Both towns sit in the south east of the county, both are within reach of the M50 and the Gloucestershire and Worcestershire commuter markets, and both have far less of the cheaper terraced and ex-local-authority stock that pulls the Hereford median down.

Hereford is the cheapest of the four larger towns. That is not a comment on the city’s desirability; it is a comment on its housing mix. Hereford is the only place in the county with real numbers of flats and terraces, 457 of its 1,296 sales, and those are what make the median what it is. A detached house in Hereford sold for a median £399,950, within £23,000 of Ross.

Kington is the cheapest town in the county and the most volatile. Its median of £223,500 rests on 40 sales in a year, and its detached median of £400,000 comes from just 17 of them. Treat the ranking as sound and any single Kington number as provisional. The same caution applies to Bromyard, on 63 sales.

One geography note. These are Royal Mail postal towns, not parishes or wards, so “Hereford” here includes a wide rural ring of HR1, HR2 and HR4 villages, and “Ross-on-Wye” and “Ledbury” both reach across the county boundary in places. It is the right unit for comparing places against each other, and the wrong unit for drawing a council boundary.

Be careful with the Rightmove figure for Hereford

Search for Hereford house prices and Rightmove’s sold-price page for the town is usually the first result. On 10 August 2026 it reported an overall average of £664,080, “141% up on the previous year”, with an average terraced price of £1,376,429.

Those cannot be residential averages. A £1.38 million typical terrace in Hereford is not a market, it is a distortion, almost certainly one or more bulk or commercial transactions landing in a simple average of everything registered. Rightmove’s pages for the smaller towns looked normal on the same day, at £299,092 for Ross-on-Wye, £280,648 for Ledbury and £235,809 for Leominster.

The lesson is not that Rightmove is wrong. It is that a simple average of sold prices in a small market can be wrecked by one transaction, which is exactly why the UK House Price Index adjusts for the mix of property sold, and why the table above uses medians. If a figure for Hereford looks extraordinary, check what it is an average of before you repeat it.

How many homes change hands here

Not many, and that is the single most useful thing to know about this data. The Land Registry recorded around 200 sales a month across the whole county in the months where registration is complete: 257 in August 2025, 230 in October, 204 in December. The published counts for the most recent months, 144 for March 2026 and lower still after that, are undercounts that will rise as paperwork catches up.

Two consequences. Monthly movements are noise, not trend, and the newest month is always provisional. Anything you read about “the latest month” in this county is built on a few hundred sales and will be revised.

What this means if you are moving

If you are selling, the market is behind you for the first time in three years, but the strength is in houses rather than flats. A semi or a terrace priced to the current market is selling. A flat is not carried by the county figure at all, and needs pricing on its own merits.

If you are buying, the affordability gap has narrowed rather than opened. Prices rose 4.7 per cent while the rest of the region managed 2 to 3 per cent, so Herefordshire is a little less of a bargain against Worcestershire and Shropshire than it was a year ago. It is still cheaper than England as a whole. Look hard at what the commute costs before you fix on a price: there is no fast train to London from here, and what the rail options really cost is a bigger number than most buyers expect.

If you are staying put, your home is worth about 4.7 per cent more in cash terms than a year ago, 20 per cent more than five years ago and 41 per cent more than ten.

The line from these prices to the county’s housing target

There is a direct connection between the figures on this page and the biggest planning argument in Herefordshire. The Government’s standard method for calculating housing need uses local house prices against local earnings, so a county where prices rise faster than wages gets a larger housing requirement.

After the December 2024 rewrite of the National Planning Policy Framework, Herefordshire’s requirement went up sharply, and the council abandoned the draft Local Plan it had been working on and started again. It is now looking for land for around 27,600 homes over twenty years. The prices on this page are one of the inputs to that number.

Common questions

What is the average house price in Hereford?

£286,995 across Herefordshire in May 2026, the latest month in the UK House Price Index, covering all property types. In the Hereford postal town itself, the median completed sale over the twelve months to June 2026 was £275,000.

Are Herefordshire house prices going up or down?

Up. Prices rose 4.7 per cent in the year to May 2026, faster than Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Powys, the West Midlands or England. They remain 1.3 per cent below the county’s October 2025 peak of £290,700.

How much is a detached house in Herefordshire?

£442,363 on average across the county in May 2026, up 5.0 per cent on the year. By town, the median detached sale was £423,000 in Ross-on-Wye, £410,000 in Ledbury, £400,000 in Bromyard and Kington and £399,950 in Hereford.

Where is the most expensive place to buy in Herefordshire?

Ross-on-Wye, on a median sale of £330,000 over the last twelve months, followed by Ledbury at £316,750. The cheapest is Kington at £223,500.

Is Hereford cheaper than the rest of the county?

By median sale, yes: £275,000 against £330,000 in Ross-on-Wye and £316,750 in Ledbury. That is mostly a difference in housing mix rather than in value. Hereford holds nearly all of the county’s flats and much of its terraced stock, and a detached house in the city sells for close to what one does in Ross.

How much does a first-time buyer pay in Herefordshire?

An average of £221,607 in May 2026, against £352,153 for a buyer who already owns a home.

Where can I check what a specific house sold for?

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

Related

• Hereford to London trains: why the cheap London season ticket goes the long way round, and what Birmingham and Cardiff actually cost.
• Hereford planning: the 27,600-home requirement these prices help set, and the bypass due to start in December.
• Hereford roadworks, parking and travel: the £37m road programme and where parking costs £5.50 a day instead of £17.
• Things to do in Hereford: what the cathedral, the museums and Queenswood cost.

Sources

• UK House Price Index, Herefordshire (ONS and HM Land Registry) for the county average, property-type and buyer-type figures and the annual changes.
• UK House Price Index data for Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Powys, Monmouthshire, the West Midlands and England, all read on 10 August 2026, plus the Herefordshire series for May 2016, May 2021, August, October and December 2025 and January to March 2026 for the longer run and the sales volumes.
• HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for the town-by-town medians, taken from every transaction record registered with a Hereford, Leominster, Ross-on-Wye, Ledbury, Bromyard or Kington postal town address and a transaction date between 1 July 2025 and 26 June 2026, with non-residential records excluded.
• Rightmove sold-price pages for Hereford, Ross-on-Wye, Ledbury and Leominster, read on 10 August 2026.
• Herefordshire Council, Call for Sites 2025 for the housing requirement that the price data feeds into.
• HM Land Registry Price Paid search to look up an individual address.

UK House Price Index figures for the most recent months are provisional and are revised as more sales are registered. Check the linked sources before relying on any figure for a decision.