The places paying the highest council tax relative to house prices are not the places with the highest-value homes

Standfirst: A data analysis of 2025-26 council tax bills, May 2026 house prices, 2025 deprivation scores, adult social care finance and current local political control suggests England’s council tax burden is less a story about party control than about geography, tax base and statutory service pressure.

Scope note: This piece analyses England. Council tax, valuation dates and social care systems differ across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so a UK-wide council-by-council table would not be directly comparable without a separate methodology.

Executive Summary

Council tax is heaviest, relative to current property values, in lower-value housing markets. Across 295 English billing authorities with matched UK House Price Index data, the median Band D bill in 2025-26 was equivalent to 0.78% of the local average house price in May 2026. In the North East the regional median was 1.48%; in London it was 0.39%.

The highest ratios are clustered in more deprived, lower-price areas. Hartlepool, Burnley, County Durham, Middlesbrough and Blackpool were at the top of the matched table. Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Wandsworth were at the bottom. The correlation between the council-tax-to-house-price ratio and the IMD 2025 deprivation score was 0.63, a strong association but not proof of causation.

Adult social care is now built into council tax rises, but it does not solve the care problem. MHCLG’s 2025-26 release says average Band D council tax in England rose to £2,280, up 5.0%, and that 147 adult social care authorities used all of their social care precept flexibility, with the precept adding £34 to the average Band D bill nationally. Our local rows show a median social-care precept increase of 2.0% among authorities with the relevant entry.

Political control should be treated as context, not as the explanation. Open Council Data shows a fragmented 2026 local-government map, with majority, minority, coalition and mayor-led arrangements. In our matched data, differences by control bucket mostly track differences in region, deprivation and housing markets. That fits recent academic work warning against simple claims that one party locally “taxes more” once central grant and national constraints are accounted for.

The Tax Looks Flat Only Until You Put It Beside House Prices

The central oddity of council tax is well known but still striking in the local data. The bill is tied to property bands, yet England’s bands still rest on 1 April 1991 property values, not today’s market. Current house prices have moved unevenly since then, especially between London, the South East and many northern and coastal authorities.

In this analysis, the median 2025-26 average Band D bill was £2,323 across English billing authorities. That sounds fairly even nationally: most authorities sit within a few hundred pounds of one another. But current average house prices range from around £130,000 in some lower-price areas to well above £1.2m in Kensington and Chelsea.

That is why the same kind of annual bill can represent very different implied burdens against local property wealth. Hartlepool’s average Band D bill was £2,499, against a May 2026 average house price of £131,342, equal to 1.90%. Westminster’s was £1,019, against £836,331, equal to 0.12%.

This does not mean every household in Hartlepool is poorer than every household in Westminster, or that every Band D home is worth the local average. It does show that current property values and tax bills have drifted far apart.

The Regional Map Is The Story

The regional ranking is blunt:

Region	Median Band D bill	Median average house price	Median Band D as share of house price
North East	£2,445	£158,002	1.48%
Yorkshire and the Humber	£2,246	£192,309	1.19%
North West	£2,382	£209,691	1.11%
East Midlands	£2,330	£246,120	0.95%
West Midlands	£2,270	£238,999	0.93%
South West	£2,380	£307,253	0.80%
East of England	£2,294	£328,939	0.68%
South East	£2,375	£374,405	0.61%
London	£2,086	£545,315	0.39%

The table is not a league table of virtue or failure. It is a map of tax base. Places with lower property values can have ordinary-looking council tax bills that loom larger relative to local housing wealth. Places with very high property values can have low ratios even when absolute living costs are severe.

Deprivation And The Tax Base Pull In Opposite Directions

The highest relative-burden authorities are not random. Among the 12 highest ratios in the matched data, many also rank among England’s more deprived districts on the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025. Blackpool ranked 1st by IMD average score, Middlesbrough 2nd, Burnley 3rd and Hartlepool 6th.

That matters because local government is asked to fund services in places where need is often higher but the tax base is weaker. The Institute for Government’s Performance Tracker has made a similar point about the way greater reliance on council tax tends to benefit less-deprived councils, while demand-led services, especially adult and children’s social care, crowd out other local services.

The data does not support a simple claim that deprivation mechanically causes higher bills. Grants, local history, service mix, property bands, discounts, collection rates, referendum rules and council decisions all matter. But it does support a more careful conclusion: the places where a Band D bill weighs most heavily against local property values are often places with higher social and service need.

Adult Social Care Is The Pressure Behind The Precept

Adult social care is one reason council tax has become so politically charged. The Department of Health and Social Care reported £34.5bn of total adult social care expenditure in England in 2024-25, including £29.4bn of gross current expenditure. It also reported 2.02m requests for support from people new to social care and 672,000 people receiving long-term support at 31 March 2025, while warning that some request data is not directly comparable with previous SALT-based figures because of the move to Client Level Data.

Council tax carries a visible part of that pressure through the adult social care precept. MHCLG says the 2025-26 council tax requirement included £654m from adult social care precept flexibility. In our matched local authority rows, 127 of 132 authorities with a usable adult-social-care precept percentage were at or above 2.0%.

But the precept is an imperfect tool. It raises more in places with a stronger tax base, not necessarily in places with greater care need. Councils and think tanks across the political spectrum have made this point in different language: council tax is local revenue, but the demand it is increasingly asked to support is national, statutory and demographic.

Political Control Is Not A Shortcut Explanation

There is a tempting version of this story that asks whether Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Reform, Green or independent-led councils charge more. The data argues for restraint.

Open Council Data’s 2026 English council composition table shows a fragmented landscape: majority councils, minority administrations, coalitions, joint administrations and directly elected mayors. The category with the highest median council-tax-to-house-price ratio in our matched table was Reform-majority councils at 1.17%, followed by Labour-majority councils at 1.00%. Conservative-majority councils sat at 0.68%, Liberal Democrat-majority councils at 0.59%.

That should not be read as a causal party ranking. Reform-majority councils in 2026 are disproportionately located in lower-price, more deprived or post-industrial areas. Liberal Democrat-majority councils are more common in higher-price southern districts. Conservative councils in this dataset also skew toward different property markets. Geography is doing a great deal of the work.

That caution is reinforced by research by Benjamin Lockwood, Francesco Porcelli and James Rockey, published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2025, which found no effect of Labour or Conservative local control on total service spending, spending composition or Band D council tax rates once central grant was controlled for in their 1998-2015 close-election design. The study’s period predates Reform’s local breakthrough and today’s fiscal context, but the warning is still useful: English councils operate inside national constraints.

What Previous Work Adds

This analysis sits alongside, rather than replaces, a growing body of work on council tax and local government finance.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has repeatedly shown why England’s council tax is structurally dated: the tax still uses 1991 valuations, and reform or revaluation would create winners and losers unless central grant and transitional protection were redesigned at the same time.

The National Audit Office’s 2025 work on local government financial sustainability warned that recent funding increases had not removed pressures from population change, need complexity and service costs. It also noted the growing number of councils needing exceptional financial support.

The King’s Fund, Health Foundation and House of Commons Library have each documented the adult social care funding problem from different angles: rising expenditure, workforce and provider pressures, demographic demand, unmet need and the difficult politics of deciding who pays.

Recent journalism has covered the same tension from Westminster and local angles. The Guardian, Financial Times and Times have all reported on speculation and pushback around council tax and social care reform in 2025-26. Local BBC reporting on councils such as Nottingham shows the household-level result: near-maximum council tax rises in authorities trying to recover from acute financial stress while protecting statutory services.

What Reform Would Have To Be Honest About

The data points to three separate questions that are often blurred together:

Fairness between households: Should a household in a high-value property pay more relative to today’s property value than the present system requires?
Adequacy of council funding: Would any reform actually give councils enough money to meet statutory duties, or merely redistribute existing pain?
Social care funding: Should a national care system rely heavily on a local property tax whose yield varies sharply by place?

Those questions do not all have the same answer. A revaluation could make the tax more current but create politically difficult losers. A proportional property tax could be more coherent but would hit asset-rich, cash-poor households without careful deferral or relief. A high-value surcharge, such as the UK Government’s 2026 consultation on homes worth £2m-plus from April 2028, is targeted but far narrower than a full reset. A national social care settlement could reduce pressure on council tax, but it would require another revenue source or different spending choices.

Caveats

This analysis compares average Band D council tax for the area of the billing authority including local and major precepts with UK HPI average house prices for May 2026. It is not a household-level affordability measure. It does not adjust for income, discounts, single-person reductions, council tax support, rents, tenure or the actual value of Band D homes in each area.

Adult social care finance is published at councils with adult social services responsibilities, which do not always match billing-authority geographies. The local adult social care table is therefore a companion analysis, not a direct row-by-row explanation for every district bill.

Political control is current administrative control or council composition context, not a measure of how residents voted or a causal variable. No overall control and coalition councils are deliberately kept separate.