Land by postcode · ME area · Rochester
Rochester covers three postcode districts, ME1, ME2 and ME3, in Medway. Planning applications here are decided mostly by the Medway planning authority, with Tonbridge and Malling and Gravesham covering the rest. Below: what homes sold for, which planning controls apply, and what that means before you sell or develop a plot in Rochester.
Residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry between 2024-08 and 2026-07 across all three of Rochester'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
2,621
Median sale price
£330,000
Median £ per m² of floor area
£3,867
Median, last 12m vs prior 12m
0%
£330,000 → £330,000
Mix of sales: 17% detached, 35% semi-detached, 37% terraced, 11% flats.
New-build sales 2023–2024: 332 of 2,774 (12%). 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 2,710 live postcodes in Rochester's three districts whose centroid falls inside it. This measures postcodes, not land area, and says nothing about any individual plot.
78 of 2,710 postcodes
Mostly in ME3 and ME2: 46 of ME3's 867 postcodes and 32 of ME2's 950 postcodes.
37 of 2,710 postcodes
Kent Downs
217 of 2,710 postcodes
Historic Rochester · Star Hill to Sun Pier · Watts Avenue/Roebuck Road · Upnor · Star Hill, Rochester and 8 more
451 of 2,710 postcodes
9 separate directions recorded, each removing particular permitted development rights within a defined area. The largest named one is the Strood North & Frindsbury.
No postcodes in Rochester's three 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.
3% of postcodes in Rochester are inside the Green Belt, so Rochester has land both inside and outside it. The Green Belt postcodes sit mostly in ME3 and ME2. 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.
Rochester's three districts are split between planning authorities: Medway (89% of sampled postcodes), Tonbridge and Malling (6%), Gravesham (5%).
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 Rochester, 3% of postcodes are in the Green Belt, 1% in a National Landscape and 8% in a conservation area. Green Belt land is concentrated in ME3 and ME2; 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. 17% of postcodes in Rochester are under an Article 4 direction (9 separate directions), 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 Rochester the median sale is £330,000, from £310,000 in ME1 to £365,000 in ME3, and only 12% of 2023–2024 sales were new-build homes, so builders have been quiet 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 Rochester would be measured against a £330,000 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. Rochester here means the three postcode districts whose most common post town is Rochester. 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.