How much deposit does a first-time buyer need in 2026?

open for offer lets you test the market before you list. The average first-time-buyer home in England cost £245,515 in July 2026. A 10% deposit on that is £24,552, and a 20% deposit is £49,103. Both have risen since 2021.

How much has the deposit gone up?

HM Land Registry and the Office for National Statistics publish a separate price index for first-time buyers. It is the cleanest official answer to what a first home costs.

The price of a first home in England is £34,680 higher than five years ago, a rise of 16.4%. Against 2016 it is £61,986 higher, a rise of 33.8%.

At a 10% deposit, that is £3,468 more cash than a buyer needed in 2021. At 20% it is £6,936 more. Wages had to cover that, or a parent did.

What does that look like where you live?

The national figure hides most of the story. The same index runs at council level, and the spread across four towns where we work is wide.

A first-time buyer in Cambridge needs roughly twice the deposit of one in Peterborough for an equivalent first home. The two towns are in the same region.

What the index does not tell you

It records prices paid, not deposits put down. Nobody in government publishes what buyers actually deposit, so the 10% and 20% columns above are arithmetic on the price, not a survey.

Real deposits vary widely. Some buyers use 5% schemes and some use far more than 20%. We have not measured that, and we are not going to guess at it here.

Prices for recent months are also a first estimate and get revised as more sales register.

Which of these buyers is yours?

The same index splits England by who is buying, and the two groups do not buy the same houses. In July 2026 the average first-time-buyer home cost £245,515. The average home bought by someone who already owned one cost £357,496. Across all buyers it was £293,479.

That is £111,981 between the two kinds of buyer, and £47,964 between a first home and what the average buyer pays.

Movers have not had it easy either. The average home bought by an existing owner cost £303,454 in July 2021, so that figure has risen by £54,042 in five years, against £34,680 for a first home.

If your house sits near the first-time-buyer figure, the deposit is your gate. Your likely buyer is saving cash, and the cash either exists or it does not.

If it sits nearer £357,496, your buyer almost certainly owns a home already. Their deposit is not savings. It is equity, locked inside a property they have not sold yet. Your gate is not their bank balance, it is their chain.

Why this matters if you are selling

Because the deposit is a hard gate. A buyer who is £4,000 short cannot bid at all, however much they like your house.

That is invisible from the outside. You see a quiet week and assume the price is wrong. Sometimes the price is wrong. Sometimes the cash was never there.

The only way to tell the two apart is to find out who comes forward, before you commit to an asking price or an advert.

Cutting the price does not fix a deposit problem. Take £10,000 off an asking price and you move a 10% deposit by £1,000. If your buyer is short by five figures, the cut buys you nothing and costs you the whole £10,000.

And the cut is public. Once an advert has carried one number and then a lower one, every buyer who looks afterwards has seen both. You can cut the price. You cannot un-list.

What to watch instead of the asking price

An advert tells you how many people clicked. It does not tell you how many of them could complete. What you need to know is who came forward, whether they already own a home they have to sell first, and what they would pay before anyone showed them a number to react to.

None of that is visible once a property is advertised at a price, because the price has already done the anchoring. Ask first, then price.

Find out who is actually there

open for offer is the pre-market, the market that exists before a property is ever advertised. You can get a market estimate, then test the market.

You set no asking price. Buyers can register interest in your home on its page, whether or not you pay. The queue on your home's page shows how much interest there is, whether or not you pay. Nothing is advertised. If nobody is there, nothing public has happened.

Your account and your market estimate cost nothing. Testing the market is £9.99 a month, cancel any time.