Average UK private rent reached £1,383 a month in May 2026. But annual rent inflation has fallen from a record 9.1% two years ago to 3.3% today, and the regions that drove the surge have swapped places with the ones that once lagged.
The average private rent across the UK was £1,383 a month in the 12 months to May 2026, the highest level the Office for National Statistics' Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) has recorded.1 That headline obscures the more useful story: the rate at which rents are rising has been slowing for a year and a half.
Annual rent inflation peaked at 9.1% in the 12 months to March 2024 — a record for the series, which began in 2015 — and has fallen in almost every reading since.1 By December 2025 it was down to 4.0%, the lowest reading since May 2022; by May 2026 it stood at 3.3%.1 The level of rent is still climbing, in other words, but the boom that pushed it there peaked two years ago and has been losing momentum ever since.
The affordability squeeze behind that record level predates the recent boom. A median-income private-renting household in England spent 36.3% of its income on an average-priced let in the financial year ending 2024, the most recent official figure available, against a long-run average of around a third going back over a decade.23 Rents have gone on rising since; the ONS has not yet published an update covering the 2025–26 period.
Look inside the national figure and the story sharpens. In the 12 months to June 2024, London was the fastest-inflating region in England at 9.7%, while the North East was among the slowest at 5.9%.1 London's rate kept climbing after that, peaking at 11.5% in the 12 months to November 2024 — the fastest slowdown of any region since, falling 9.5 percentage points to 2.0% by May 2026, the lowest of any English region.1
The North East moved the other way. Having lagged London through 2024, it became the English region with the highest rent inflation from mid-2025 onward — 9.2% in August 2025 — and was still the fastest-inflating region in England at 5.9–6.3% through May and June 2026, even as the rest of the country slowed.1 The two regions have effectively swapped places.
The record rent-inflation figure only bit as hard as it did because it was running so far ahead of prices generally. At its March 2024 peak, UK rent inflation (9.1%) was 5.9 percentage points above general consumer price inflation, CPI, which stood at 3.2% that month.15 By June 2026, CPI had eased to 2.6% and rent inflation to 3.3% (May 2026 reading), a gap of just 0.7 percentage points — the narrowest since before the boom began.15
Wages have closed the gap too. Regular pay excluding bonuses grew 3.4% in the three months to May 2026, essentially level with rent inflation and, for the first time since the boom began, no longer falling behind it.6 That is a marked change from the peak years, when rent inflation repeatedly outpaced both prices and pay.
The PIPR does not publish a causal breakdown of regional rent moves, so any explanation here is the desk's reading of the pattern, not an established finding. Two things line up with the timing. First, London rents rose fastest and furthest in 2022–24, so the region has the largest base to grow from — a high starting level naturally slows further percentage growth even if demand stays firm, a base effect the ONS itself uses to explain similar swings in the house-price series.1 Second, remote and hybrid work reduced the premium on living near central London through the pandemic years, and commentators including Zoopla have linked cooling city-centre demand and a renewed hunt for affordability to price moves in cheaper regions.4 Neither claim is proven by the PIPR data alone; both are consistent with it.
Zoom out further and the record rent level looks less like a new crisis and more like a persistent baseline condition. On ONS's rent-to-income measure, the average rent in England has been above the 30% affordability threshold in every single year from the financial year ending (FYE) 2016 to FYE 2024 — not a recent slide from a comfortable starting point, but a decade-long feature of the English market.2 Over that same period, ONS finds private-renting households' incomes have on average grown faster than rents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland alike.2
The three most recent comparable readings show the ratio moving in both directions, not climbing in a straight line: 36.5% of income in FYE 2022, 34.2% in FYE 2023, and 36.3% in FYE 2024.2 London is the outlier that drags the England-wide figure above the threshold — its own ratio has ranged from 38.5% to 57.0% of income since FYE 2016, while most other English regions have stayed within a 19–36% band and several, including the North East and East Midlands, have remained comfortably affordable throughout.2
PIPR measures the stock of all private tenancies, not just newly advertised lets, so it lags market turning points by several months compared with letting-agent indices such as Rightmove's or HomeLet's, which track new lets only.1 Scotland's figures rely mainly on newly advertised rather than achieved rents and carry an ONS-flagged data-quality caveat, so its readings are less comparable with the rest of the UK.1 The affordability series changed its income-modelling source between the FYE 2023 and FYE 2024 editions, which the ONS says affects year-on-year comparability, so the FYE 2024 figure (36.3%) should be read as a snapshot more than a precise one-year change from FYE 2023 (34.2%).2 The two most recent months in any PIPR or CPI release are provisional and subject to revision. And no published breakdown explains why London and the North East reversed — the causes above are the desk's reading of a documented pattern, not an ONS finding.