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Rent by station: sources and methodology

The line and zone pages join three public datasets. This page says exactly how, so that anyone citing a figure knows what it means — and so that anyone who thinks one is wrong can check the working.

Where the data comes from

The one thing to understand before citing a figure

ONS publishes rent by borough, not by station. Every stop shows the average for the borough it physically sits in. Two stops in the same borough therefore show the same number, and a figure describes the area around a station rather than the streets immediately outside it.

That is a real limit, and it is why these pages rank stops rather than claiming precision they do not have. The useful question a line page answers is not “what does a flat by this exact station cost” but “where along this line do the cheaper boroughs start” — and for that, borough-level data is the right resolution.

How stations are matched

  • Boroughs are assigned by coordinate, never by name. Guessing from the name would be wrong often enough to matter — Kensington (Olympia) is in Hammersmith & Fulham, not Kensington & Chelsea.
  • Interchanges published under several NaPTAN ids are merged into one station when they share a name and sit within 600m. That is what makes Stratford one station rather than three, and what joins the Elizabeth line’s “London Paddington” to the Bakerloo’s “Paddington” 62m away. Genuinely distinct stations that share a name are kept separate, because TfL disambiguates those in the name itself.
  • A station’s lines are taken from each line’s own route sequence, not from the station record — the latter also lists lines that pass through without stopping.

Zones

  • A station on a zone boundary belongs to both its zones and is counted in both. That is how the fare works, so it is how the tables read.
  • Tram stops have no travel zone. London trams are a flat-fare network, so tram-only stops are absent from every zone figure rather than being assigned one.
  • 30 stops on the network are outside Greater London — Reading, Slough and Shenfield on the Elizabeth line, Watford Junction on the Lioness among them. They appear on their line’s page, because the line genuinely serves them, but they carry no zone, no borough and no London rent figure.
  • One documented exception: Clapham Junction carries no zone in the TfL data although it is in Zone 2. The zone is set from TfL’s published fares map rather than leaving London’s busiest interchange out of the zone tables. It is the only such override, and the ingest reports it every time it runs.

Walking distance and live listings

A listing counts as near a station when it is within 1500m in a straight line. Walking times are that distance multiplied by 1.3 to allow for streets, river crossings and station entrances, then divided by 80m per minute. It is an estimate from coordinates, not a routed walk, and it is stated as such rather than presented as a measured time. Listings without a usable coordinate — a meaningful minority — are counted as near nothing rather than attached to a guess.

Share of local pay

Rent as a percentage of median gross full-time pay for people living in that borough. Two caveats are deliberately visible rather than buried: the earnings are before tax and National Insurance, and they are for 2024, which lags the rent figures. Both make the ratio look kinder than the lived experience, so hiding either would flatter the number.

Which of these pages are indexed

Generating a page for every line is only legitimate if every page has something of its own to say. A line page is allowed into search results only when it has at least 8 stops with a published rent figure across at least 3 boroughs. Below that, the table is one or two rent figures repeated, which the borough pages already carry and carry better.

18 of 20 lines currently qualify. The Liberty line and Waterloo & City line do not, and their pages are marked noindex — still linked, still readable, simply not competing in search until there is more to say.

The test is measured on every render rather than kept as a list, so a page qualifies the moment the underlying data earns it, and loses its place if that stops being true.

How often this updates

Rent figures are refreshed monthly, roughly two weeks after each ONS release; the current data is August 2026, retrieved . The network itself changes only when a station or line does, and was last retrieved 2026-09-22. Every page shows both dates, so a stale page is visible to you rather than only to us.

Limitations worth knowing

  • Rent is borough-level, so a stop in an expensive corner of a cheap borough will look cheaper than it is, and the reverse.
  • ONS figures cover existing and new tenancies, so they sit below what someone searching today will be asked to pay. FTR’s own asking rents run higher.
  • The City of London has no published ONS rent series — its sample is too small — so the 11 stations sitting in it show no figure rather than an invented one.
  • Bexley and Kingston upon Thames have no station on any of these networks. They are not missing from the tables by oversight; they have no stops to list.
  • “Cheapest stop” means cheapest surrounding borough. It is not a statement about any individual property, and it says nothing about what is actually available there today.

Licence and reuse

The underlying data is published by Transport for London and the Office for National Statistics under open licences, and the attribution required by those licences appears on every page that uses it. You are welcome to cite or reproduce our tables with a link back to the page you took them from.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, it may well be — a station in the wrong borough, a missing stop, a line that has changed. Tell us which page and which row on the contact page and we will check it against the source and correct it.

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