Best Rental Yields in the UK: 248 Towns Ranked

The best rental yields in the UK right now

Rental yield is the number that decides whether a buy to let works. It is the annual rent a property produces expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it, and it is the figure a lender's stress test, your cash flow and your return on capital all hang off. A higher yield means the rent covers the mortgage more comfortably, the interest cover ratio clears more easily, and there is more headroom when rates move or a void period bites.

To find the best rental yields in the UK we took median sold prices from HM Land Registry Price Paid data for the 12 months to July 2026 and paired them with median private rents from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents to March 2026, across 364 towns. The pattern is clear and consistent: the highest gross yields sit in the North West, the North East and Yorkshire, where a modest purchase price meets a solid rent. Wallsend in Tyne And Wear tops the table at 9.1%.

Top 25 UK towns by gross rental yield

These are the 25 highest-yielding towns in our dataset, ranked on gross yield from area median price and median rent. Transaction volume over the last 12 months is included so you can gauge how liquid each market is: a high yield in a town with only a couple of hundred annual sales is a thinner, harder-to-exit market than one turning over thousands of homes a year.

Prefer to run your own numbers on a specific property? Our rental yield calculator turns a purchase price and monthly rent into a gross and net yield in seconds, and the buy to let mortgage calculator shows what the rent needs to be to pass a lender's stress test.

North versus south: where the yield really is

Averaged across our data, the 88 northern towns we track (the North West, North East and Yorkshire) return a mean gross yield of 5.0%, against 4.3% across the 176 towns of the South East, South West and East of England. That gap is almost entirely a price story. Rents in the south are higher in cash terms, but prices are higher still, so the yield percentage lands lower. In the north the ratio flips: rents are strong relative to purchase prices that often sit well under £200,000.

The strongest southern markets do not disappear, they just sit a point or two below their northern equivalents. Coastal and commuter towns with genuine rental demand, such as Portsmouth, Southampton and Norwich, still clear yields that stress test comfortably, and the capital-growth history of the south is a separate part of the investment case that a yield table does not capture.

Best rental yields by region

The regional picture shows the same north-to-south gradient. Below is the single highest-yielding town in each region alongside the region-wide average across every town we track there, so you can see both the standout markets and the typical level.

The North West is the deepest pool of high-yield stock: Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Lancashire between them supply a large share of the towns clearing 6 percent and above, backed by real transaction volume and university, hospital and logistics employment underpinning tenant demand. Yorkshire and the North East offer similar arithmetic in a smaller number of towns.

What counts as a good rental yield?

There is no single right answer, but some rules of thumb travel well. A gross yield below about 4 percent is hard to make work on a mortgaged buy to let once finance and costs are taken off, and it typically only stacks up where you are buying primarily for capital growth. Around 5 to 6 percent gross is a solid, financeable target in most of the country. Above 7 percent gross, which our top northern towns reach, gives real headroom against a stress test and a void, though very high headline yields can also flag thinner markets, higher management intensity or more variable stock, so they warrant closer diligence.

1. Work out the gross yield: annual rent divided by the price, times 100. Use it to shortlist areas.
2. Strip out costs to get a net yield: deduct letting and management fees, insurance, maintenance, ground rent or service charge, an allowance for voids, and mortgage interest.
3. Sense-check the finance: run the rent through a buy to let stress test to confirm it clears the lender's interest cover ratio at their stress rate.
4. Layer in the capital view: a lower-yield, higher-growth area can beat a high-yield, flat-price one over a full hold period.

How yield drives the finance

For a portfolio landlord the yield is not just a return metric, it is what gets the deal funded. Specialist buy to let lenders test whether the rent covers the mortgage by a set margin, the interest cover ratio, at a stress rate. Higher-yielding stock clears that test with room to spare, which is why the north is where so much leveraged buy to let activity concentrates. Thin-yield southern purchases more often need a lower loan to value, a five-year fixed rate, or top slicing from other income to pass.

If you are building or refinancing across several properties, the mechanics matter as much as the map. Read how the buy to let stress test works and how top slicing can rescue a tight case, then see the full picture in our portfolio landlord finance hub. When you are ready to fund a purchase, our portfolio mortgages and portfolio landlord mortgages pages set out how we place these cases.

Chasing yield often means looking outside your own area. Our locations pages break the market down county by county, and the portfolio LTV and ICR calculator shows how a new purchase lands against your whole portfolio, not just on its own.

Methodology and sources

Prices are median sold prices from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, accessed via the Construction Capital data lake, covering the 12 months to July 2026. Rents are median private rents from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, dated March 2026. Gross yield is the annualised median rent divided by the median sold price for each town, expressed as a percentage and rounded to one decimal place in this copy.

These are area-level medians, not property-level figures. A median blends flats, terraces, semis and detached homes, and blends a whole town's price and rent ranges into a single number, so any individual property can sit well above or below the yield shown. Land Registry prices exclude most new-build and commercial transactions, and rent and price data are collected on different timescales, which introduces a small timing mismatch. Transaction counts are the number of Land Registry sales recorded for the town over the 12-month window.

Gross rental yield

Annual rent as a percentage of the purchase price, before any costs, finance or tax. The headline figure used to compare areas.

Net rental yield

Yield after deducting running costs, letting fees, maintenance, voids and mortgage interest. What you actually keep, usually two to four points below gross.

Median

The middle value in a ranked list. A median sold price or rent is less distorted by a few very high or low figures than an average.

Interest cover ratio (ICR)

The margin by which rent must cover the mortgage interest at a lender's stress rate, typically 125 or 145 percent depending on the borrower's tax position.

Void period

Time when a property sits empty between tenancies, producing no rent. A key reason net yield falls below gross.