If you've been assuming London is where the rental market rewards landlords most, the current data says otherwise. Right now, the average gross rental yield across Glasgow's postcodes sits at 7.5%, more than double what you'd get putting the same money into most of central London.
What gross rental yield actually means
Gross rental yield is simply a property's annual rent as a percentage of what it costs to buy. A £100,000 flat renting for £700 a month brings in £8,400 a year, which works out to an 8.4% yield. It's the single number that lets you compare a cheap flat in Aberdeen against an expensive one in London on equal terms as an investment, rather than just as a place to live.
Where the gap is starkest
The pattern holds up even more clearly at the individual postcode level. In Bradford's BD1, the average flat is going for around £60,000 and renting for about £725 a month. That's a 14.5% gross yield, and it's not a fluke from one or two odd listings: the figure is drawn from more than 50 sales and 80 rentals.
Compare that with W1J in Mayfair, where the average property costs just under £3 million and rents for £3,850 a month. That works out to a yield of 1.6%, nearly ten times lower.
Leeds and Newcastle back up the pattern rather than adding another one-off outlier to the pile. LS2 in Leeds runs a 10.1% yield across a genuinely large sample: 86 sales and 314 rentals. NE6 in Newcastle sits at a similar 10.1%, backed by over 100 sales. These aren't thin, easily-skewed markets. They're ordinary UK postcodes where the price of buying has stayed low enough that the rent still makes sense as an investment.
A note on outliers
A handful of postcodes in the data show even higher single numbers than the ones above, and we've deliberately left them out of the headline comparison. Central London's SW1A, for example, shows a 16.9% yield on paper, but it's built from a small number of very high-value lettings, and one unusual listing can swing an average like that hard. The city-level pattern, Glasgow ahead of London by a wide margin, and a cluster of northern English cities consistently outperforming the south, holds up even once those extreme edge cases are stripped out.
None of this means London property is a bad idea, or that every cheap northern postcode is a hidden goldmine. It means the gap between what things cost and what they rent for varies far more across the UK than most people assume, and it's worth checking the actual numbers for a specific postcode before assuming a well-known city is the safe or obvious choice.
Check your own shortlist
The full postcode-by-postcode map, an area comparison tool, a budget-based search, and a built-in stamp duty and cashflow calculator are all free to use at YieldRadar.
Figures are gross averages from live market listings as of publication, not completed sale prices, and are not a valuation of any individual property.