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SUMMARY
Yes. Rents in London are still rising, but the market now looks like a roughly 3% annual-growth market rather than a return to the double-digit rental shock seen after the pandemic.
The most useful change is not the level of rents but the reacceleration. ONS annual growth moved from around 2% in spring to 3.0% in the latest reading, while Rightmove recorded its strongest quarterly increase in London asking rents since 2023.
That pickup is real, but it is not equally strong everywhere. Lambeth and Southwark are growing faster than the London average, while Westminster is already recording annual rent declines despite remaining one of the most expensive markets in the country.
The new-let market remains softer than asking-rent headlines suggest. Rightmove shows landlords testing higher prices, but Foxtons' achieved-rent data indicate that tenants are still pushing back when those asking prices move beyond what their budgets can absorb.
London's rental shortage is starting to tighten again just as rent growth picks up. Rightmove reports the sharpest regional fall in available rental supply in London, while Zoopla sees demand rising with supply broadly unchanged.
Tenant competition is still nowhere near the 2022 peak. A typical London rental now attracts around eight enquiries, far below the extreme national peak of 22, although it remains above the pre-pandemic norm of roughly five.
Affordability is now acting as a hard ceiling on rent growth. ONS estimates that private rents already absorbed 41.6% of median private-renter household income in London, and Foxtons renters are spending around 99% of the budgets they give agents.
Wages are finally growing faster than rents, but the recovery is slow because tenants are starting from a much worse position. A year of 4% wage growth against 3% rent growth only repairs a small part of the affordability damage built up since 2021.
The first months under the Renters' Rights Act have not produced a visible one-off shock in rents or listings. The more credible risk is gradual: if regulation, tax and financing costs steadily shrink the rental stock, the effect would show up through tighter supply over several years rather than through an immediate spike.
The most likely near-term path is therefore slow and uneven rent growth. London still has too few rental homes to generate sustained citywide falls, but tenants are stretched enough that another long run of 10% annual increases looks much harder to achieve.
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Are London rents still rising now?
Yes. London rents are rising again today, but at roughly 3% a year rather than the double-digit pace tenants faced during the post-pandemic squeeze.
The latest Office for National Statistics reading puts the average private rent in London at £2,317 per month, up from £2,250 a year earlier. That works out to 3.0% annual growth. The more interesting part is what happened just before it: London rental inflation had been 2.0% in April and May, then 2.2% in June before jumping to 3.0%. Average rents also rose 0.6% between June and July alone.
Rightmove is seeing almost the same annual increase in a completely different part of the market. Its second-quarter Rental Price Tracker put the average London home coming onto the market at £2,791 per month, 2.9% higher than a year earlier. Asking rents rose 2.0% in one quarter, their biggest quarterly increase since 2023.
Zoopla is slightly cooler, with its London new-let measure running at 2.2% in its June rental report. Put those three together and the direction is fairly clear: London rents are moving higher again.
The pace, however, has changed dramatically. ONS rental inflation in London peaked at 11.6% in late 2024. Today's roughly 3% rate is only about one quarter of that.
| London rent measure | Latest level | Annual change | What it captures |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONS | £2,317/month | +3.0% | New and existing private tenancies |
| Rightmove | £2,791/month | +2.9% | Newly advertised homes |
| Zoopla | — | +2.2% | New-let rental index |
| Foxtons | Around £576/week YTD | Broadly flat recently | Achieved rents in its London market |
Didn't London rent growth basically stop last year?
Almost. London rent growth came very close to stalling before turning upward again, which is why today's market feels so different from a few years ago.
ONS recorded annual London rental inflation of 11.6% at its peak in late 2024. By the end of 2025, that rate had fallen to just above 2%. Hamptons found an even sharper slowdown among people actually signing new leases: London new-let rents fell for 13 consecutive months before returning to annual growth in February 2026.
Over the whole of 2025, Hamptons says newly agreed London rents fell 2.7%, or about £63 per month, taking the average back to levels last seen around mid-2023. Inner London fell 3.7% and Outer London 1.6%.
So there really was a rental correction. It happened mostly through lower new-let rents and much slower growth across the wider stock, rather than through a dramatic citywide fall.
Existing tenants reset at different times, so an ONS index covering millions of ongoing and new tenancies moves much more slowly than an index tracking the latest deals.
The recent move back toward 3% annual growth suggests the cooling phase has probably gone about as far as it can for now. London rents found a floor without ever becoming cheap.
| Stage of the market | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2022–24 | Double-digit increases and extreme competition |
| Late 2024 | ONS London inflation peaks at 11.6% |
| 2025 | New-let rents weaken; Hamptons records a 2.7% annual fall |
| Early 2026 | Annual London growth hovers around 2% |
| Latest readings | ONS reaches 3.0%; Rightmove asking rents rise 2.9% |
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Towers sold off plan to overseas buyers have been reselling below what the first owners paid for a decade now. Where asking prices sit furthest from what flats actually earn and resell for.
Are people signing new London leases actually paying more?
Only modestly. New tenants in London are paying more in some datasets, but landlords currently have much less power to push through large increases than asking-rent headlines suggest.
Rightmove says the average advertised London rent has reached £2,791, up 2.9% over a year. Hamptons also saw new-let growth return after 13 months of declines, led by Inner London.
Foxtons gives us a useful reality check because it tracks the rents actually agreed through its London branches. Achieved rents were only about 1% higher year on year in March. By April, they were effectively flat, and its year-to-date figure remained broadly unchanged in May.
Foxtons also found renters spending around 99% of their stated budgets. There is very little unused room there. If tenants tell an agent they can spend £2,500 and they are already agreeing deals near £2,475, landlords cannot keep raising rents by £200 simply because another index says London supply is tight.
So two things are happening at once. Landlords are testing higher asking prices again, especially in stronger parts of London, while achieved-rent data show tenants pushing back once those prices run beyond their budgets.
That is a much calmer market than 2022 and 2023, when scarce listings routinely attracted enough competing tenants to turn an ambitious asking rent into an achievable one.
Why do London rent reports give such different numbers?
Because a London tenant renewing an old lease and someone bidding on a newly advertised flat are effectively shopping in different markets.
ONS measures a broad stock of private rents, including both existing and new tenancies. Rightmove starts much earlier in the process and measures the asking price when a property is advertised. Foxtons looks at rents actually achieved through its branches. Hamptons concentrates heavily on newly agreed and renewed tenancies, while Zoopla uses a repeat-rent methodology designed to track new-let pricing.
Suppose someone has rented a flat since 2023 for £2,000 a month. The landlord raises it to £2,100 this year. A similar vacant flat nearby may meanwhile appear on Rightmove at £2,350 before eventually letting for £2,250. All three prices are real, but they answer different questions.
The timing changes the story too. Asking rents can jump within weeks when landlords become more confident. Achieved rents only move once tenants agree. ONS moves more slowly because most of London's rental stock does not reset every month.
Today's apparent contradiction is useful. ONS and Rightmove both show roughly 3% growth, suggesting genuine upward pressure, while Foxtons' flatter achieved-rent figures show that this pressure still meets plenty of resistance when tenants actually sign.
London makes more sense when those measures stay separate rather than being forced into one average.
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Is London starting another rental boom?
No. London's recent rent acceleration deserves attention, but the evidence is nowhere close to another 2022-style boom.
Rightmove's London asking rents increased 2.0% in a quarter, the strongest quarterly move since 2023. ONS also recorded a 0.6% monthly increase in its latest reading. Both are fresh signs that rents have stopped drifting sideways.
The scale is still modest. Annual asking-rent growth is 2.9%. ONS is at 3.0%. Zoopla recently measured London new-let inflation at 2.2%. Foxtons has seen achieved rents roughly flat year on year.
Compare that with late 2024, when ONS was recording 11.6% London rental inflation, or with 2022, when Rightmove says the average rental listing attracted 22 enquiries nationally.
Competition today is far lower. Rightmove now records about eight enquiries per London rental home, giving the capital the closest supply-demand balance of any region in its latest report.
Calling this a new boom would be premature. We would need several more quarters of faster increases, worsening tenant competition and falling supply before the label fits. For now, London has moved from near-stagnation back into moderate growth.
Where in London are rents rising fastest now?
Some of the stronger rent growth is coming from Inner London, while the very expensive end of Central London is struggling to raise prices at all.
Lambeth is a good example. According to the latest ONS local data, its average private rent is £2,519 a month, up 4.2% in a year. Southwark is at £2,431 and up 3.8%. Both are comfortably ahead of London's 3.0% increase.
Croydon gives us a useful outer-London comparison. Average rent there is much lower at £1,581, yet annual growth of 3.3% is only slightly above the London average. Cheapness alone is not deciding which boroughs rise fastest.
Westminster goes in the opposite direction. It remains one of Britain's most expensive rental markets at £3,179 a month, but ONS says rents are 2.0% lower than a year earlier. One-bedroom rents are down 1.5%, while homes with four or more bedrooms are down 2.8%.
Rightmove's wider London data point in the same direction: it says the recent quarterly acceleration was driven by Inner London.
This gives us a more interesting map than the usual "central versus outer London" story. Well-connected inner boroughs can still push rents higher because demand remains deep enough. At the extreme top end, landlords are hitting a much harder affordability ceiling. Outer London is still growing, but it is not automatically leading just because rents start lower.
| Area | Average monthly rent | Annual change |
|---|---|---|
| Croydon | £1,581 | +3.3% |
| London overall | £2,317 | +3.0% |
| Southwark | £2,431 | +3.8% |
| Lambeth | £2,519 | +4.2% |
| Westminster | £3,179 | -2.0% |
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Towers sold off plan to overseas buyers have been reselling below what the first owners paid for a decade now. Where asking prices sit furthest from what flats actually earn and resell for.
Is London's rental shortage getting bad again?
Yes, supply has started tightening again, and this is probably the strongest reason London rents have turned upward instead of continuing to flatten.
Rightmove says the number of available rental homes nationally slipped below the previous year's level in the second quarter for the first time since 2022. London recorded the biggest decline in available rental supply of any region in that report.
This follows several years in which supply had gradually recovered from the extraordinary shortage immediately after the pandemic. That recovery helped take much of the heat out of rents.
The longer comparison still looks poor for tenants. Zoopla says rental supply remains 20% to 30% below pre-pandemic levels in every UK region. Its latest rental report found no increase in London rental supply while London demand rose 6% over four weeks, making the capital the only region where demand increased.
There is another clue in the sales market. Zoopla previously found that 31% of London homes listed for sale had been rental properties, almost three times the 12% share across the rest of the country. Not every one of those sales permanently removes a rental home because another landlord can buy it, but the number is too large to shrug off.
London has more rental choice than during the worst months of 2022, yet it still lacks enough homes to create sustained downward pressure on rents. Lately, that improvement in supply has started going into reverse.
Are tenants still fighting over every London rental?
No. London tenants have much more breathing room today, even though finding a good rental is hardly easy.
Rightmove's latest data show the typical London rental receiving around eight enquiries. That is below the national average of 10 and gives London the closest supply-demand balance among the regions Rightmove tracks.
The national comparison shows how much conditions have changed. The average rental property attracted 22 enquiries at the 2022 peak. Today it gets 10. Before the pandemic, the norm was around five.
Foxtons has also been reporting softer competition. New renters per instruction were 9% lower year on year in March, 6.5% lower in April and 8.5% lower in May. Meanwhile, its new listings were running around 3% above the previous year in May.
That is a meaningful improvement for anyone who remembers the worst of the rental squeeze. Tenants have more time to compare properties, and landlords with an overpriced or poorly presented flat cannot assume that ten desperate applicants will rescue the asking price.
Still, eight enquiries per London property is not a loose market. It is far healthier than 22, but it remains well above the pre-pandemic norm of around five.
| Competition measure | Earlier peak / baseline | Latest reading |
|---|---|---|
| Rightmove enquiries per rental, national peak | 22 in 2022 | 10 now |
| Pre-pandemic Rightmove norm | ~5 | 10 now |
| London Rightmove enquiries | — | ~8 |
| Foxtons renters per instruction in May | Prior year | -8.5% |
| Foxtons new listings in May | Prior year | +3.0% |
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Can London rents keep rising when tenants are already stretched?
London rents can keep edging higher, but affordability is now strong enough to block another long run of double-digit increases.
The numbers are already extreme. ONS puts the average London rent at £2,317 a month, which is about £27,800 a year before council tax, energy or any other household costs. Rightmove's average asking rent of £2,791 works out to roughly £33,500 a year.
ONS's latest detailed affordability work found that private rents consumed 41.6% of median private-renter household income in London in the financial year ending 2024. London was easily the least affordable English region.
And rents have risen further since most of the income used in that calculation was earned.
Foxtons' recent data make the same point in a more immediate way. Its London renters have been spending around 99% of the budgets they give the agency, while stated budgets have barely grown year on year in several recent reports.
Once tenants hit that point, demand does not disappear because people still need somewhere to live. Behaviour changes instead. Couples choose smaller flats, people share for longer, renters move farther from work, adult children stay with parents, or a property simply sits until the landlord cuts the price.
That affordability ceiling is already visible in Westminster, where rents are falling despite severe housing scarcity across London.
A shortage can keep rents high and push them gradually higher, but household incomes make another sustained 10% annual increase much harder to pull off.
Are London wages finally catching up with rents?
Yes, wages are currently growing faster than rents, which gives tenants a little relief after several brutal years.
Rightmove recently compared annual wage growth of roughly 4.4% with London asking-rent growth of 2.9%. Zoopla's June report put average UK earnings growth at around 4%, almost twice its 2.1% national new-let rental inflation rate.
That is a major change from the post-pandemic period, when rents were sometimes increasing by 10% or more while household earnings grew much more slowly.
But catching up is painfully slow when the starting point is so bad.
Consider a simplified household whose rent rose from £1,700 to £2,200 during the boom. A year in which income grows 4% and rent rises another 3% improves the rent-to-income ratio only slightly. It does nothing to erase the roughly £500 monthly increase already absorbed.
This is why renters can hear that affordability is "improving" and still feel that London has never been more expensive. Both can be true.
The latest figures suggest the affordability squeeze is no longer getting worse at anything like its old speed. Recovering the purchasing power lost since 2021 will take much longer.
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Has the Renters' Rights Act already pushed London rents higher or driven landlords out?
So far, no. The first months under the Renters' Rights Act have not produced the sudden rent spike or landlord exodus that some forecasts implied.
Foxtons examined the first full month under the new regime and found London new listings 3.0% higher than a year earlier. Renter registrations rose 13.7% from the previous month as the usual summer season picked up, while achieved rents and renter budgets barely changed year on year.
Rightmove reached a similar early conclusion. Its first quarter of data covering the new rules showed rental activity behaving broadly in line with normal seasonal patterns rather than suddenly breaking.
Hamptons has also looked directly at landlord rent increases. Between January and April 2026, the number of rent increases was actually 3% lower than during the same period of 2025. Based on May's pace, Hamptons estimated that about 31% of eligible tenants would experience an increase over a year, compared with 40% in the previous 12 months and 50% at the early-2024 peak.
The landlord side is more complicated. Buy-to-let economics remain difficult in London, where purchase prices are high and yields tend to be thinner. Rightmove's representative two-year fixed buy-to-let mortgage rate without a fee recently stood at 5.55%, above 5.20% a year earlier.
Some landlords will sell under that pressure, and the large share of former rentals appearing in London's sales market shows that exits are real. Yet a landlord selling does not tell us whether the property leaves the rental sector until we know who buys it.
As of now, the legislation has not created a visible one-off shock in London rents. The bigger risk is gradual: if the combination of regulation, taxation and financing costs keeps shrinking the rental stock over several years, tenants will feel it through tighter supply.
Could London rents actually fall from here?
Yes, London rents can fall in particular boroughs and in the new-let market, but a large citywide decline still looks unlikely without a much bigger improvement in rental supply.
We already know falls are possible. Hamptons recorded a 2.7% decline in newly agreed London rents during 2025. Westminster is currently down 2.0% on the broader ONS measure. Inner London itself went through a period of falling new-let rents before recovering.
Demand has also cooled substantially from the 2022 peak. Tenant competition is lower, affordability is stretched, more first-time buyers have left renting for homeownership, and London's weaker labour market gives landlords less freedom to raise prices.
Those forces could easily produce another flat period or small declines in parts of the capital.
A deep London-wide correction would need something more. Rental supply would have to rise substantially, tenant demand would need to weaken further, or the economy would have to deteriorate enough to force landlords to accept much lower rents.
The freshest supply figures point the other way. Rightmove says London has just experienced the largest drop in available rental stock among UK regions, while Zoopla recently found London rental demand rising 6% with supply unchanged.
For now, that shortage makes stagnation much easier to imagine than a genuine rent crash.
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So, are rents in London still rising?
Yes. London rents are still rising today, and the latest data actually show a small reacceleration, but this is a roughly 3% market rather than the 10%-plus rental shock London went through a few years ago.
ONS has average London rents 3.0% higher than a year earlier, up from 2.0% annual growth only a few months before. Rightmove's asking rents are up 2.9%, with the strongest quarterly increase since 2023. Zoopla has also seen London rental demand turn higher while supply stops improving.
That is enough fresh evidence to say the recent pickup is real.
The limit is equally clear. Foxtons' achieved rents have recently been close to flat year on year. London rental listings attract around eight enquiries rather than the extreme levels seen in 2022. Wages are growing faster than rents. Westminster is already recording falling rents, and London households have little spare room left in their rental budgets.
London therefore looks set for slow, uneven rent growth unless supply changes materially. Strong inner boroughs can still produce increases of 3% to 4% or more, while the most expensive pockets may struggle to increase rents at all.
The post-pandemic rental boom has finished. What remains is a structurally expensive city with too few rental homes and tenants who are increasingly unable to pay much more.
That combination is enough to keep London rents creeping upward. It is also why another explosive rise looks much harder from here.
OUR METHODOLOGY
We approached the question "Are rents in London still rising?" as a market diagnosis rather than a search for one rent-growth number. London can appear to be rising, cooling or falling depending on whether the measure covers existing tenancies, new lets, asking rents, achieved rents or individual boroughs, so we assessed each of those markets separately before forming the conclusion.
We broke the analysis into the factors that actually determine the answer: the direction and pace of rents, conditions on new lets, rental supply, tenant competition, affordability, earnings, local divergence and the early effect of the Renters' Rights Act. We did not blend those datasets into one artificial average.
Official ONS data were used as the main citywide anchor because they cover a broad stock of private tenancies and provide consistent historical and borough-level comparisons. Rightmove was used for newly advertised rents, rental listings and enquiry levels; Zoopla for new-let inflation and supply-demand trends; Foxtons for achieved rents, renter budgets and branch-level activity; and Hamptons for newly agreed rents, landlord rent increases and the 2025 correction.
Time comparisons were used deliberately. The latest monthly and quarterly readings were set against the 2025 cooling period, the late-2024 inflation peak and, where useful, pre-pandemic competition levels. That helps separate a genuine change in direction from one noisy monthly move.
Borough data were used as a stress test rather than a league table. Lambeth, Southwark, Croydon and Westminster were compared because they show how different parts of London can move in different directions even when the citywide average is rising.
Supply and tenant competition were assessed separately from rent inflation because higher asking rents do not automatically mean landlords can achieve them. The gap between Rightmove asking rents and Foxtons achieved rents was particularly useful for judging how much pricing power landlords actually have at the point of agreement.
Affordability was tested using both ONS rent-to-income data and more immediate evidence on renter budgets. Wage growth was then compared with current rent growth to see whether household incomes are beginning to catch up or whether rents are still outrunning earnings.
For the Renters' Rights Act, we focused on observable behaviour around and immediately after implementation: listings, renter registrations, achieved rents and the frequency of rent increases. Those early readings were treated as evidence about whether an immediate disruption was visible, not as proof of the Act's long-term effect.
Key sources used for this analysis include Office for National Statistics private rent and house price data, ONS private rental affordability data, Rightmove's Rental Price Tracker, Zoopla's Rental Market Report, Foxtons' London Lettings Market Reports, Foxtons' first-month review under the Renters' Rights Act, Hamptons' Spring 2026 lettings analysis, Hamptons' Summer 2026 lettings analysis, and the UK Government's Renters' Rights Act commencement notice.
The conclusion was formed only after those indicators were read together. Where they agreed, we treated the evidence as stronger; where they diverged, that divergence was kept in the article because it explains the market better than a single headline number would.
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