With rental and housing prices spiralling across the country, many families and couples hoping to start a family find themselves priced out of large cities like London and Brighton.
Parents feeling the pinch
A recent study has found that 70% of Brits with young children find it more difficult to be a parent since the cost-of-living crisis. While rental and house prices affect everyone, the high cost of childcare – often as much as a mortgage or monthly rental payment – is causing parents real financial issues, with many going into debt in order to bridge those expensive pre-school years.
However, with more flexible, remote and hybrid working post-pandemic, plenty of Brits now have more flexibility around where they live – not having to go into the office every day, or at all, gives them the freedom to move further afield in search of a family-friendly lifestyle.
Where’s the most affordable place for families?
One of the UK’s oldest mutual insurers, Shepherds Friendly, commissioned a study to find the most affordable place for families to live in the UK. Analysing average salaries, rent, house prices, utility and childcare costs, as well as happiness levels, 40 of the UK’s most popular cities were pitted against one another, and the winner might surprise you.
40 miles north of Cambridge, Peterborough is a cathedral city with roots dating back to the Bronze Age. The city boasts a thriving theatre and sporting scene, award-winning green spaces, plus there’s a direct train into London Kings Cross that takes less than an hour.
Let’s take a look at the city’s vital statistics: A 3-bed home costs an average of £992 per month to rent, and you can buy a similar family home for £235,000 – almost £30k below the national average of £264,500.
With a very respectable happiness score of 7.3/10 and an average salary of £33k, it’s the average £700-per-month childcare costs and utilities at just £160 per month that make Peterborough the cheapest place for families to live in the UK.
Most expensive cities revealed
Just down the A1, Cambridge is among the least affordable places to raise a family in the UK. With London and Brighton named as the first and second most expensive places to live for families, rising childcare bills, rents and house prices mean families on average incomes are being squeezed out of these sought-after cities.
In London, childcare alone will set you back an eye-watering £1,829 per month. With an average take-home salary of £2,880 per month for Londoners, it’s easy to see why it’s been named the least affordable city for families in the UK.
Cheapest places to live
With the cheapest utility bills in the study, Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast is the second cheapest place to live, followed by Newcastle and neighbouring Sunderland, both in the North East of England.
When it comes to cheap property prices, Dundee comes out on top. £128,250 will get you a 3-bedroom house – for context, you can find 1-bed flats in the outskirts of London for this amount, if you’re lucky.
Despite having the lowest house prices in the study, Dundee’s rental prices average £875 per month for a family home. This is still below average, but the cheapest can be found in Kingston Upon Hull, averaging out at just £685 per month for a 3-bedroom house.
