Land by postcode · LU area · Dunstable
Dunstable covers two postcode districts, LU5 and LU6, in Central Bedfordshire. Planning applications here are decided by the Central Bedfordshire planning authority. Below: what homes sold for, which planning controls apply, and what that means before you sell or develop a plot in Dunstable.
Residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry between 2024-08 and 2026-07 across both of Dunstable's postcode districts. This is market context for the town, not a land valuation: what a plot is worth depends on what can be built on it, which these figures do not show.
Sales in 24 months
2,246
Median sale price
£350,000
Median £ per m² of floor area
£4,000
Median, last 12m vs prior 12m
-6.3%
£361,350 → £338,500
Mix of sales: 22% detached, 35% semi-detached, 29% terraced, 14% flats.
New-build sales 2023–2024: 473 of 2,200 (22%). A rough proxy for recent building activity: these are homes sold by builders, not development sites.
For each designation on the planning.data.gov.uk register, the share of the 1,545 live postcodes in Dunstable's two districts whose centroid falls inside it. This measures postcodes, not land area, and says nothing about any individual plot.
164 of 1,545 postcodes
86 of 1,545 postcodes
Chilterns
154 of 1,545 postcodes
Dunstable Conservation Area · Toddington Conservation Area · Houghton Regis Conservation Area · Harlington Conservation Area · Eaton Bray Conservation Area and 6 more
15 of 1,545 postcodes
1 separate direction recorded, each removing particular permitted development rights within a defined area.
No postcodes in Dunstable's two districts fall inside: National Park.
Flood zones, tree preservation orders, local plan allocations, settlement boundaries and non-designated heritage are not included here and are checked in a full assessment.
11% of postcodes in Dunstable are inside the Green Belt, so Dunstable has land both inside and outside it. Which side of the boundary a plot sits on determines whether the Green Belt tests apply to it at all.
These are town-level facts. The free assessment checks your actual boundary against the same registers and the local plan and tells you plainly what they mean for your plot.
Central Bedfordshire covers 96% of the sampled postcodes in Dunstable.
Draw your boundary, tell us what you own, and an architect checks it against these registers and the local plan. Free, no obligation, and you get a straight written answer.
It depends on where the plot sits, not on the town average. Across Dunstable, 11% of postcodes are in the Green Belt, 6% in a National Landscape and 10% in a conservation area. on Green Belt or National Landscape plots a new home is the exception and needs a specific case, and a replacement dwelling, a conversion or a modest extension is usually the realistic route. Outside those designations the questions that decide it are whether the plot is inside or adjoining the settlement boundary in the local plan, whether it has its own road access, and what is next to it.
Often, yes. 1% of postcodes in Dunstable are under an Article 4 direction (1 separate direction), which withdraws particular permitted development rights, so an outbuilding, extension or change of use that is automatic elsewhere needs an application there. Outside those areas, permitted development applies to houses and their gardens but not to agricultural land or paddocks, where a new building or a new use normally needs permission or prior approval.
Developers look at three things before they talk about price: whether the plot is outside the Green Belt and any National Landscape, whether it sits inside or beside the settlement boundary, and what finished homes sell for. In Dunstable the median sale is £350,000, from £342,000 in LU5 to £370,000 in LU6, and 22% of 2023–2024 sales were new-build homes, so builders are active here. A single plot usually goes to a local builder or a self-builder; a site for five or more homes attracts regional housebuilders, normally through an option or a conditional contract rather than an outright purchase, so the price you see quoted is not the price you receive.
There is no town figure for land, because a plot's value comes from what can be built on it, not from where it is. As a guide, a serviced plot with consent for one house commonly sells for around a third of the finished house value, which in Dunstable would be measured against a £350,000 median sale. The same plot without consent, or inside the Green Belt, is worth a small fraction of that, and a paddock with no realistic route to consent is worth agricultural or amenity value only. The free check tells you which of those your plot is before you talk to anyone about a price.
Computed from open-data records; town-level, not plot-level measurements. Dunstable here means the two postcode districts whose most common post town is Dunstable. Sales: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (2024-08-01 to 2026-07-31), © Crown copyright, Open Government Licence. Designations: planning.data.gov.uk (OGL); conservation areas and Article 4 directions are made locally and published on that national register. Postcode centroids: OS Code-Point Open, contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Figures computed 2026-10-19.