Key takeaways
- UK mortgage holders paid an average £224.40 a week on their mortgage in the year to March 2025. Only £102.30 of that was interest and protection.
- Housing costs outside the mortgage ran to £92.20 a week across UK households in the same year: £32.30 council tax, £32.00 improvements, £11.90 repairs, £9.40 water.
- Adding the cost half of the mortgage to that stack gives £194.50 a week, about £10,114 a year, of which the mortgage contributes 52.6%.
- Leaseholders in England paid a mean service charge of £1,720 and mean ground rent of £304 in 2023-24, or £38.92 a week, on top of council tax, water and insurance.
- In England 36% of households owned outright in 2024-25. Their mortgage payment is zero and the running stack is the whole cost.
The true cost of owning a home is about £194.50 a week, and the mortgage is half of it
What does your house actually cost you in a year? Most people answer with the mortgage payment, because that's the figure that leaves the account on a fixed day each month. It's the wrong figure, and it's wrong in two directions at once.
In the financial year to March 2025, UK households with a mortgage paid an average of £224.40 a week on it. That comes from the Office for National Statistics Living Costs and Food Survey, which splits the payment into its parts. Interest was £99.10. Mortgage protection premiums were £3.20. The remaining £122.10 was capital repayment, and capital repayment doesn't leave your net worth. It moves from one side of your balance sheet to the other.
The same survey recorded £92.20 a week of housing spending the mortgage payment never touches: council tax, water, repairs, improvements, buildings insurance and service charges. That second figure averages across all UK households, renters included, which makes it a floor for an owner rather than a ceiling. Put the cost half of the mortgage next to it and you get £194.50 a week, or roughly £10,114 a year. The mortgage is 52.6% of that. The rest is the part the payment never shows.
£122.10 of a £224.40 mortgage payment is savings, not spending
Start with the half that people do count. In the year to March 2025 the Living Costs and Food Survey covered 8,650,000 UK households holding a mortgage on their main home, and their average weekly payment of £224.40 split three ways: £99.10 interest, £122.10 capital repayment, £3.20 protection premiums. Capital took 54.4% of the payment.
Interest is rent on borrowed money and it's gone the moment it's paid. Capital repayment buys down the loan. Sell the house the next morning at the same price and you'd get every pound of the capital back and none of the interest. Counting the whole payment as the true cost of owning a home overstates what ownership consumes by more than half, which is the same split that decides whether rent is dead money.
That split isn't fixed. In 2022-23 the same survey put mortgage holders at £74.30 interest against a £178.10 total payment, so interest was 41.7% of it. By 2024-25 it was 44.2%. Rates did that, and rates are still where they were: the Bank of England's average quoted rate on a two-year fixed mortgage at 75% loan-to-value was 4.92% at the end of August 2026. The same arithmetic runs through mortgage leverage, where the interest line is what decides whether borrowing to own has paid.
The lines the payment leaves out come to £92.20 a week
Here is the second half, from the same survey and the same year, averaged across all 28,710,000 UK households. The chart above plots every line, with capital repayment and interest in place for scale.
- Council tax and domestic rates, £32.30 a week.
- Alterations and improvements to the dwelling, £32.00, of which £26.90 was work contracted out.
- Maintenance and repair, £11.90, including £1.40 of central heating repairs.
- Water charges, £9.40.
- Other regular housing payments including service charge, £3.30.
- Buildings insurance, £3.10.
- Refuse collection, £0.20.
Strip out improvements, on the argument that a new kitchen is capital rather than consumption, and the remaining stack is still £60.20 a week, or £3,130 a year. That's 60.7% of the mortgage interest bill. On the narrow reading the running costs are worth three fifths of the interest; on the wide reading they're worth almost as much again as interest and protection combined.
Council tax is the biggest single bill outside the mortgage, and Band D is not the average home
Council tax deserves its own paragraph because the number quoted in public is not the number most people pay. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government reports that "the average Band D council tax set by local authorities in England for 2026-27 will be £2,392, which is an increase of £111 or 4.9% on the 2025-26 figure." Band D is a reference band, used for comparing authorities. It isn't the typical dwelling.
The same release gives the figure that is: "the average council tax per dwelling will be £1,868 in 2026-27, an increase of 5.5% over 2025-26." That's £35.92 a week, against £46.00 for Band D. The survey figure of £32.30 sits below both, and it should: it covers the whole UK, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where the bands and the rates differ, and its year ended two years before the 2026-27 bills went out.
The direction is what carries. Council tax per dwelling rose 5.5% into 2026-27, faster than the headline Band D increase of 4.9%. A fixed-rate mortgage payment doesn't do that.
Leaseholders start £2,024 a year behind
If you own a flat, or one of the 675,000 owner-occupied leasehold houses in England, the stack above understates you badly. The English Housing Survey's leasehold fact sheet for 2023-24 found that among leaseholders paying a service charge, "the average (mean) annual service charge was £1,720 (median £1,375)". For flats the mean was £1,857. For houses it was £881.
Ground rent sits on top. The survey put the "average (mean) ground rent for all leaseholders" at "£304 per annum (median £120 per annum)", up from £191 in 2018-19. Mean service charge plus mean ground rent is £2,024 a year, or £38.92 a week. That single pair of lines is more than three times the £11.90 a week the average UK household spends on maintenance and repair.
Location moves it further. The same survey recorded a mean annual service charge of £2,338 in London against £1,561 in the rest of England. How far and how fast that figure can move is a separate question, worked through in the limits on a service charge increase. There are 1.9 million owner-occupied leasehold dwellings in England, so this is not a niche case.
The two errors run in opposite directions and nearly cancel
Now the part that makes the mortgage payment such a durable piece of folk arithmetic. It overstates the cost by including £122.10 of saving. It understates the cost by excluding the running stack. Those two errors are close to the same size.
Here's the check, and it's a derivation rather than a measurement. Three of the lines above fall mostly on owners: maintenance and repair (£11.90), improvements (£32.00) and buildings insurance (£3.10), £47.00 a week between them. Owner occupiers were 65% of English households in 2024-25. If the whole £47.00 falls on that 65%, the per-owner figure is £72.31 a week. Council tax, water, service charges and refuse are paid across tenures, so leave those at £45.20. An owner's running stack comes out at £117.51 a week, about £6,110 a year.
Add the £102.30 of interest and protection and the true cost of owning a home lands at £219.81 a week, against a mortgage payment of £224.40. The gap is 2%. The payment is roughly the right total for entirely the wrong reasons, which is why the shortcut is so hard to dislodge.
Break either half and the coincidence goes. Fall to a lower interest share and the payment starts overstating. Own outright and it stops describing anything at all.
36% of English households own outright and pay the whole stack anyway
The English Housing Survey put owner occupation at 65% of English households in 2024-25, split between 36% who owned outright and 29% buying with a mortgage. So 55.4% of owner occupiers have no mortgage payment to mistake for their housing cost.
For those households every pound of housing cost is running cost. Council tax, insurance, repairs, service charge, water. The figure a mortgaged owner uses as shorthand is, for the outright owner, exactly zero, and the cost is unchanged.
That's also why the affordability statistic reads oddly. The same survey found mortgagors "spent 19% of their household income on mortgage payments", with a mean weekly payment of £242 in England and a median of £208. That 19% measures the payment. It doesn't measure the cost, and it counts £122.10 of weekly saving as an outgoing.
The strongest objection: improvements are not consumption
The serious counter-argument to all of this is that £32.00 a week of improvements has no business in a cost stack. A new bathroom is an asset. Contracted-out home improvements alone were £26.90 a week. Call that capital and the annual cost drops from £10,114 to £8,450, and the mortgage share climbs from 52.6% to 63.0%.
The objection has real force, and the data can't fully settle it. Two things push back. First, the narrow stack of £60.20 a week survives the objection intact, because it already excludes every improvement line. Second, the boundary between the two survey categories isn't where intuition puts it. The same table books £1.90 a week of central heating installation under improvements and £1.40 of central heating repairs under maintenance. A boiler replaced because the old one died lands on the improvement side of the line. The scale of that work is not small: the English Housing Survey found 4.0 million dwellings, 15% of the English stock, failed the Decent Homes Standard in 2024, and put the estimated average cost of bringing a dwelling to energy efficiency band C at £7,480 across all tenures.
So both numbers are in the piece. £60.20 a week is the floor that no reasonable reading of the categories can argue away. £92.20 is the figure if you count what households actually spent on the building.
The rent comparison is a different question with its own answer
The obvious next move is to set all this against rent, and it's worth saying where that argument lives rather than re-running it here. ONS figures show "average UK monthly private rent increased by 3.3%, to £1,388, in the 12 months to June 2026". That's £320.31 a week, against the owner's £219.81. The full version of that comparison, stamp duty and the deposit's forgone yield included, is worked through in rent is dead money.
What matters for the true cost of owning a home is narrower. The running costs don't vanish for a tenant. They're bundled into one line and paid by a landlord first. The two figures aren't measuring the same population either: the rent figure covers the private rented stock, while the ownership stack averages across every tenure and dwelling type in the survey. Price exposure is the thing renting genuinely avoids, and that's its own argument in your house as an investment.
What this arithmetic cannot tell you
The base is mixed, and that's the largest weakness. Mortgage figures come from the survey's mortgage-holder sample of 1,440 households. The running-cost lines come from the full sample of 5,000 households, renters included. The 65% adjustment above is a bound built on an assumption, not a measurement, and it joins an English tenure share to UK-wide spending lines. The true per-owner figure sits somewhere between £92.20 and £117.51 a week.
Survey error matters at this granularity. A line like £3.10 a week of buildings insurance is estimated from that same sample of 5,000 households across a year, and the smallest lines in the table are the ones carrying the most sampling error.
Averages hide lumpiness. Nobody spends exactly £11.90 on repairs every week. That mean is built from households that spent nothing all year and households that replaced a roof.
Transaction costs are absent by design. Stamp duty, agency fees and conveyancing sit outside the annual running cost, and are itemised separately in the cost of moving house. Energy is absent too: fuel and power sit in a different survey category, and the £7,480 average cost of reaching band C is a capital figure rather than a running one.
The council tax figures are English. The survey line is labelled "Council tax, domestic rates" precisely because the systems across the UK are not the same thing.
Finally, nothing here touches the asset side. The UK House Price Index put the average UK property at £273,000 in July 2026, up 1.4% on the year. Whether that growth covers the stack is a different question with a different answer in every decade.
What would change the conclusion
If the interest share of the payment falls far enough. Interest was 41.7% of the mortgage payment in 2022-23 and 44.2% in 2024-25, so recent history moves this by a point or so either way. The mortgage stops being the majority of the cost once weekly interest falls below £89.00, which on a £224.40 payment is an interest share under 39.7%. Below that line the running stack is the larger half and the near-cancellation between the two errors breaks in the open.
If improvement spending is genuinely capital. On that reading the annual figure is £8,450 rather than £10,114, and the mortgage is 63.0% of the cost rather than 52.6%. The conclusion softens without reversing, because £3,130 a year of running cost is still invisible in the payment.
If you hold a lease rather than a freehold. Mean service charge and ground rent of £2,024 a year in 2023-24 land on top of everything above, and the mortgage share of total cost falls further for any leaseholder billed above the £1,720 mean.
The payment is the stable number here. It's contractual, it's known in advance on a fix, and it's the one line in the stack that doesn't move. Everything else does: council tax per dwelling rose 5.5% for 2026-27, and mean ground rent went from £191 to £304 between 2018-19 and 2023-24. LedgerTouch carries a property as a holding with costs attached, which is one way to watch the half of the arithmetic that changes. The figure worth tracking is the one that isn't on the direct debit.