This is a snapshot of where UK buy-to-let yield actually stands right now, pulled directly from live listings rather than survey data or a fixed annual report. Three things worth knowing if you're deciding where to look: the national picture, why a city's average yield is often the wrong number to trust, and which postcodes have genuinely moved in the last month.
The national picture
The gap between a UK postcode at the top of the range and one near the bottom is enormous, a 6x difference between the highest and lowest figures above, all in the same country, at the same time. The national median of around 4.1% is a real number, but it describes almost nowhere specifically, it's the midpoint of a very wide spread.
Averages lie: the same pattern shows up inside every city
Zoom into any individual UK city and the same story repeats at a smaller scale. We've broken this down for four cities so far, and the pattern holds every time: the city-wide average is a forgettable, unremarkable number, while the postcodes inside that city range from genuinely excellent to genuinely poor.
Every one of these four cities has at least one postcode near 2%, sitting alongside another postcode at 5.5% or more, within the same city. If you're comparing "Birmingham vs Manchester" as a whole, you're comparing two averages, when the real decision is closer to "which specific postcode," a question the city-level number can't answer on its own.
What actually moved this month
L7 in Liverpool moved from 10.5% to 15.5% gross yield this month, the largest genuine gain we found. NR33 in Lowestoft moved the other way, from 15.0% down to 6.0%. Before publishing figures like these, we specifically filter out postcodes where either month's yield looks implausibly high, a data quality issue (usually a holiday-let or short-stay listing priced weekly rather than monthly) rather than a real market number. What's left is the real movement, not noise dressed up as a story.
How to use this
None of this is a forecast, and none of it is a substitute for checking a specific street or property. What it is: a starting point for narrowing down where to look, built from what's actually listed right now rather than a survey or a once-a-year report. Check a specific postcode district, run your own numbers with the buy-to-let cashflow calculator, or browse the full rankings.
Figures are gross averages from live market listings as of publication. Not a forecast or a valuation of any individual property. Not financial advice.