Bury house prices: £238,266, and a £107k town gap

The average home in Bury borough sold for £238,266 in May 2026. That is the official figure from the UK House Price Index, which is built from completed Land Registry sales rather than asking prices, and it is up 3.0% on the same month a year earlier, when the average was £231,225.

That single number hides the thing that actually matters if you are moving inside the borough. Bury is six towns, and the spread between them is wider than the year’s price movement by a factor of thirty. A home in Prestwich averages £326,291. A home in Radcliffe averages £219,090. The gap is £107,201, for two towns nine minutes apart on the same tram line.

What the borough average is doing

Source: UK House Price Index, Bury, provisional figures for May 2026, the most recent month published.

Two things stand out. Flats are the only category going backwards, down 0.5% over the year, which is the same pattern showing up across Greater Manchester as mortgage costs bite hardest on the buyers with the least deposit. And the step from a first-time buyer purchase to a home mover purchase is £69,018, which in practice is the price of moving from a Radcliffe terrace to a Whitefield semi.

The index has also picked up sharply in the last two months. In April 2026 the borough average was £233,942 and the annual change was 1.0%. A month later it was 3.0%. Monthly UKHPI figures are provisional and get revised, so treat one month’s jump as a signal rather than a fact.

Town by town

The order of that list has been stable for years, and it tracks the tram line more than anything else. Prestwich and Whitefield sit at the Manchester end, three and four stops from the city centre, with the Victorian and inter-war housing stock that commands a premium anywhere in south Lancashire. Radcliffe sits at the other end, with the cheapest terraces in the borough at an average of £169,810.

Ramsbottom is the exception that does not follow the tram at all. It has no tram, it is nine miles from Manchester, and it still averages £284,967, because the pull there is the valley, the independent high street and the moor rather than the commute.

Source: Rightmove sold prices, compiled from HM Land Registry records, for sales registered up to 30 April 2026.

Whitefield’s detached average of £604,207 is the outlier on that table, and it is worth understanding before you read anything into it. Detached houses are a small minority of Whitefield sales, so a handful of large properties around Unsworth and the golf course drags that column a long way up while the town’s semis, which are what most people actually buy there, sit at £286,770, below Prestwich.

Why the borough is up 3% when most towns are down

This is the contradiction people notice, and it is not a mistake in either figure. They are different measurements.

The UK House Price Index compares one month against the same month a year before, across the whole local authority, and adjusts for the mix of properties sold. The Rightmove town figures are rolling twelve-month averages of raw sold prices in a listing area, with no mix adjustment. If a quiet quarter happens to contain fewer large detached sales than the quarter it replaces, the raw average falls even when nothing has changed about what a given house is worth.

For tracking the market over time, use the index. For working out what you might pay in one town versus the next, use the town figures, and read them as “what actually sold” rather than “what a house is worth”.

How Bury compares

Source: UK House Price Index, May 2026.

Bury is, almost exactly, Greater Manchester. The borough average is £464 below the conurbation average, which is a rounding error on a £238,000 house. It is about £54,000 below the England average and around £19,000 above the North West as a whole, which is the region including Cumbria, rural Lancashire and the Merseyside and Cheshire extremes.

The North West’s 5.8% annual rise is the number to keep an eye on. Bury is growing at roughly half that rate, so the borough is currently getting cheaper relative to the region around it.

How many homes are actually selling

Sales volumes lag the price figures by a couple of months in the index. The most recent published months for Bury are 154 sales in March 2026, 140 in February, 140 in January and 176 in December 2025. That is a market ticking over at roughly five completions a day across a borough of six towns, and it is the reason a single unusual sale can move a town average.

What this means if you are moving

If you are buying your first home, the borough’s first-time buyer average of £210,284 is the realistic anchor, not the headline. Radcliffe and the terraced streets of Bury itself are where that money goes furthest, and both are on the tram.

If you are trading up, the numbers make the case for looking one stop further out rather than one street over. The £69,018 step from first-time buyer to home mover is roughly the difference between a Bury semi and a Prestwich semi.

If you are selling, the flat picture in most towns means the asking price does the work. Check what has actually completed on your street rather than what is listed on it, and factor in the council tax band, which is a running cost buyers increasingly price in.

Anything you buy near Elton Reservoir, Walshaw or Simister is next to a site allocated for thousands of new homes, and that is worth knowing before you offer rather than after. If the commute is the point of the move, the tram fares and journey times are the other half of the sum.

Where these figures come from

• UK House Price Index, the official series produced by HM Land Registry and the Office for National Statistics from completed sales: Bury, area code E08000002. Monthly figures for the two most recent months are provisional.
• Rightmove sold prices, also drawn from HM Land Registry, presented as rolling twelve-month averages by listing area: Bury, Prestwich, Whitefield, Ramsbottom, Radcliffe and Tottington.

Figures on this page were checked against those sources on 9 August 2026.