Whether buy to let is still worth it is now one of the most asked property questions in the country, and the honest answer is that the averages have stopped meaning anything. The same month produces record landlord exits and record rents, a five-time rate hold and, on one measure, the best rental supply in years. Both the it-is-dead camp and the never-better camp can quote real numbers.
So this piece does the unfashionable thing and holds the conflicting data side by side, then answers the question the only way it can honestly be answered: worth it for whom.
The exit data cuts both ways
The exits are real. Industry transaction data reported by TwentyEA puts rental properties leaving the sector in 2025 at a record level of roughly one hundred and eighty thousand, and Property118’s landlord survey found 27% of respondents planning to quit entirely within three years, though a survey of a landlord forum’s own readers leans toward the disgruntled by construction.
The acceleration is the contested part. Hamptons reported that 9.2% of homes listed for sale in June 2026 had previously been rented, down from 11.3% a year earlier, and TwentyEA’s reporting shows rental supply reaching its highest level in seven years, with build-to-rent completions doing much of the work. The fair reading is that a multi-year exit of leveraged individual landlords genuinely happened, while the claim that it is speeding up runs against the most recent listing data.
Rents and rates set the frame
On the income side, rents sit at record levels, a squeeze we covered in our note on the rental supply fall. The supply measures diverge by what they count: TwentyEA’s build-to-rent-inclusive total sits at a multi-year high while Rightmove’s live-listings count of traditional stock shows a small annual dip, which is how record-rent and record-supply headlines coexist. On the cost side, the Bank of England has now held at 3.75% five times, and the July vote carried three members preferring a rise, up from two dissenters in June and one in April: the widest hawkish split of this cycle so far. Cheap money is not coming back on any timetable a deal should rely on, and average two-year fixed buy-to-let rates on Moneyfacts’ index stood at 5.27% at 75% loan to value in mid August 2026, up from 4.66% in March.
High rents and expensive debt in the same market is exactly the combination that splits the answer by buyer type.
The arithmetic for a 2026 buyer
Run deliberately round, illustrative numbers. A £150,000 northern terrace letting at £950 a month grosses 7.6%. After honest running costs, the sort we itemise in our gross versus net guide, call it 5.5% net before finance. A cash buyer banks that. A buyer with 75% debt at 5.4% pays most of the net income to the lender and holds a thin margin that one void or one boiler erases.
Reverse the postcode and the sums invert: a £350,000 southern flat at £1,500 a month grosses 5.1%, nets perhaps 3.5%, and cannot carry today’s debt at all. Leverage has stopped being the point of the model and become its filter.
Who still fits buy to let in 2026
The model still works, sometimes very well, for buyers with modest or no leverage, for company structures that keep full interest relief, a distinction our Section 24 guide explains, and for anyone buying high-yield stock at the prices motivated sellers are accepting on the way out. It does not work for the marginal buyer it was built on in the 2010s: one property, maximum mortgage, southern flat, personal name. For that buyer the arithmetic fails before the tax bill arrives, and the property income tax rise already legislated for April 2027 in the Finance Act 2026 tilts the individual-versus-company balance further still.
The irony of the exodus is that the sellers and the buyers are both right. The people leaving are the people the model no longer fits. The people buying are the people it now fits better than at any point since rates rose, because they are buying from the first group at a discount.
What this means for property investors
Stop asking whether buy to let is worth it in general and run your own version: your cash, your rate, your tax position, net yield after honest costs, stressed at today’s debt with no growth assumed. If the deal clears that test, this is a better buying window than the headlines allow, because record rents, thin competition and administratively exhausted vendors rarely arrive together. If it only clears the test with optimistic rent growth and a rate-cut assumption, you are the marginal buyer the last cycle burned.
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