Land by postcode · AL area · St Albans
St Albans covers four postcode districts, AL1, AL2, AL3 and AL4, in Hertfordshire. Planning applications here are decided mostly by the St. Albans planning authority, with Dacorum covering the rest. Below: what homes sold for, which planning controls apply, and what that means before you sell or develop a plot in St Albans.
Residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry between 2024-08 and 2026-07 across all four of St Albans'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
3,145
Median sale price
£585,000
Median £ per m² of floor area
£6,889
Median, last 12m vs prior 12m
+0.5%
£582,000 → £585,000
Mix of sales: 19% detached, 25% semi-detached, 30% terraced, 26% flats.
New-build sales 2023–2024: 181 of 3,096 (6%). 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 3,696 live postcodes in St Albans's four districts whose centroid falls inside it. This measures postcodes, not land area, and says nothing about any individual plot.
688 of 3,696 postcodes
Mostly in AL4 and AL3: 334 of AL4's 787 postcodes and 168 of AL3's 955 postcodes.
33 of 3,696 postcodes
Chilterns
954 of 3,696 postcodes
St Albans - St Peters Park and the Marlborough House Estate · St Albans - The Commercial Centre · St Albans - Folly Lane, Garden Fields and the Old Hospital · St Albans - Holywell Hill / Sopwell Lane · St Albans - London Road and 21 more
291 of 3,696 postcodes
15 separate directions recorded, each removing particular permitted development rights within a defined area. The largest named one is the Brick Knoll Park.
No postcodes in St Albans's four 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.
19% of postcodes in St Albans are inside the Green Belt, so St Albans has land both inside and outside it. The Green Belt postcodes sit mostly in AL4 and AL3. Which side of the boundary a plot sits on determines whether the Green Belt tests apply to it at all.
26% of postcodes fall within a conservation area. Inside one, demolition needs consent, some permitted development rights are reduced, and new work is assessed against the character and appearance of the area.
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.
St Albans's four districts are split between planning authorities: St. Albans (94% of sampled postcodes), Dacorum (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 St Albans, 19% of postcodes are in the Green Belt, 1% in a National Landscape and 26% in a conservation area. Green Belt land is concentrated in AL4 and AL3; 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. 8% of postcodes in St Albans are under an Article 4 direction (15 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 St Albans the median sale is £585,000, from £530,000 in AL1 to £662,907 in AL4, and only 6% 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 St Albans would be measured against a £585,000 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. St Albans here means the four postcode districts whose most common post town is St Albans. 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.