Population Statistics
City of Westminster
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Greater London · England

City of Westminster population

247,614people · latest estimate

Photo: Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By James Burfield, SEO consultant, Bath · Page updated · GeoNames · FSA register

City of Westminster has a population of 247,614, making it the 4th largest place in Greater London.

#4
of 255 in Greater London

City of Westminster in context

1 km
north-east to London, the nearest larger town
11,914,240
people live within 10 km
#32
largest of 6,358 UK places
City of Westminster in the UK

Distances are straight-line from the settlement's recorded coordinates. The 10 km figure sums the recorded places within that radius, so it describes how built-up the surroundings are rather than people per square kilometre.

The centre of City of Westminster sits in postcode district SW1H.

Food and drink on the high street

Registered premisesCount
Restaurants and cafés3,370
Takeaways and sandwich shops258
Pubs, bars and nightclubs147
Hotels, B&Bs and guest houses252
Supermarkets and hypermarkets82

Counts are registered food premises in the City of Westminster built-up area, from the FSA food hygiene register, extracted 17 August 2026. The boundary is drawn from where the buildings are, so these figures cover the town itself rather than the wider council area, and no total is shown because the register also lists premises nobody would call a venue: school kitchens, care homes, warehouses. Compare towns →

Shops and services

PremisesCount
Shops (all retail)5,639
Cafés268
Hairdressing salons92
Banks and building societies80
Post offices12
Gyms54
Leisure and sports centres53
Surgeries (GP, dental and similar)746
Libraries22
Community centres60
Cinemas15
Theatres45
Car parks55
Amusement arcades6
Licensed betting shops51
Bingo halls2
Adult gaming centres7
Casinos20

Shops, cafés, salons, banks, post offices and arcades are rateable premises by use on the VOA 2023 rating list — the shops figure is all general retail, charity shops included. Gambling premises come from the Gambling Commission's licensing register, which lists 6,251 betting shops nationally against the rating list's 3,838: many betting shops are rated as ordinary shops, so the licensing register is the truer count and the one used here. Categories the rating list counts badly are deliberately absent rather than wrong: petrol stations disappear into supermarket ratings, vets and museums run far under their professional registers, and pools and nurseries mostly rate inside other premises. Same built-up-area boundary as the download table on this page.

House prices

Property typeMedian sale price
Terraced (177 sales)£2,125,000
Flat or maisonette (1,277 sales)£735,000
All types (1,483 sales)£805,000
Change on the year before
each type compared with itself, July 2024 to June 2025
-11.8%

Medians of actual registered sales in the City of Westminster built-up area, July 2025 to June 2026, from HM Land Registry Price Paid data (standard open-market sales only; repossessions, part-value transfers and non-residential records excluded). A median is the middle sale, so it resists the mansion problem that skews averages. Recent sales take weeks to register, which is why the window ends before the current month. Types with fewer than 20 sales are not shown. The year-on-year change compares this window with the twelve months before it, July 2024 to June 2025, and compares each property type with itself before combining them on this year's mix. Doing it the obvious way instead, median against median, would have this town's prices swing on which kind of house happened to sell: one town in this data sold 29 detached houses one year and 9 the next, and its raw median halved without a single house changing price. The change is published only where the types compared cover most of the year's sales and the town saw 50+ of them. Compare towns →

Council tax

The area Band D council tax for Westminster, the billing authority covering City of Westminster, is £1,050 for 2026–27.

From MHCLG's council tax statistics (Table 9): the area average including police, fire and parish precepts, so it is the council's figure rather than the town's, and your own band depends on your property's 1991 valuation.

Schools

Open establishmentsSchoolsPlacesPupilsFilled
Primary schools339,0936,40970.5%
Secondary schools1111,44210,48691.6%
All-through schools11,3001,319101.5%
Sixth forms and 16+ colleges3
Local-authority nursery schools4
Special schools8
Independent schools28

The 2021 census counted 7,838 children aged 5 to 9 in the town: one state primary school for every 238 of them.

Open schools registered in the City of Westminster built-up area, from the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, extracted 24 August 2026. Each school counts once: an independent special school appears under special schools, and the phase rows are state schools. Places are reported capacity and pupils each school's latest census return, summed only over schools reporting both, and shown only where at least 9 in 10 of a phase's schools do; state primaries across measured towns run at 89.2% of capacity, secondaries 91.3%. The children-per-school figure pairs a 2021 census count with today's register, so growth or decline since the census is not in it. No inspection grades are shown because Ofsted stopped issuing single-word overall judgements in 2024 and the register no longer carries them; current inspection reports are on Ofsted's own site. England only: the register lists Welsh schools without phase detail.

Care quality, as the regulator rates it

GP practices in the built-up area with a CQC overall rating: 1 Outstanding, 30 Good, 4 Requires improvement.

Care homes: 7 Good.

Registered dental practices: 275. A count, not a judgment: CQC inspects dentists but does not rate them, so no dental practice anywhere has a rating to show.

These are the Care Quality Commission's own latest overall judgments (September 2026 publication), counted on this built-up area, never combined into any score of ours. A rating's age varies with when CQC last inspected, and unrated locations (new registrations, or types CQC does not rate) are not shown. The dental figure counts every registered location on CQC's directory, NHS and private alike; it says nothing about whether one is taking NHS patients. England only. Compare towns →

Broadband

Availability% of homes
Gigabit-capable (1,000 Mbit/s+)86.7%
Superfast (30 Mbit/s+)96.8%
Unable to get 10 Mbit/s download49 homes (0.0%)

Share of the 134,591 residential premises in this built-up area that the fixed network can serve at each speed, from Ofcom's Connected Nations coverage data (network state July 2025). Availability is what the line to a home can deliver if ordered, not what households actually subscribe to, and a full-fibre street where everyone bought the cheapest package shows 100% here. Percentile compares towns of 10,000+ residents. Compare towns →

Common questions

What is the population of City of Westminster?
The populated place itself holds 247,614 residents. Each figure describes a different boundary and all are correct; the meanings table on this page says which is which, because a population without its boundary is not an answer.

Go deeper

Postcode district SW1H
Wards, constituencies and the deprivation profile

Towns like City of Westminster

The closest statistical matches among English and Welsh towns of 10,000+ residents, with geography playing no part. City of Westminster's own figures sit in the first row for comparison.

TownCountyMedian priceOffences /1,000Median ageOwner-occupied
City of Westminster Greater London £805,000 35.9 28.2%
Oxford Oxfordshire £450,000 103.4 32.0 48.1%
Barnet Greater London £585,000 37.8 53.6%
Winchester Hampshire £505,000 89.0 38.0 56.1%
Brighton Brighton and Hove £425,000 124.9 38.2 52.3%
Greenwich Greater London £455,000 35.3 43.3%

Matched on up to six measures — house prices, recorded crime, median age, owner-occupation, gigabit availability and professional occupations — each rank-normalised across the 773 towns that carry at least four of them. The likeness is mechanical, and the columns are here so you can judge it yourself.

Nearby in Greater London

#PlacePopulation
1London8,961,989
2Brent329,100
3Islington319,143
4Bexley228,000
5Barking218,534
6Archway215,667

All 255 places in Greater London →