surrey buyer-guide cranleigh

Buying in Cranleigh: the data-sheet

Sold prices, schools, crime, broadband, council tax and flood risk for Cranleigh (GU6), Waverley — what the data says at the viewing stage.

Home-Checker Team

Cranleigh sits in the Waverley borough of Surrey, in the Weald between Guildford and Horsham, with the Surrey Hills rising to the north. The GU6 outcode covers the village itself plus Ewhurst, Rowly, Alfold Crossways and a wide band of surrounding countryside — 559 postcodes in the Ofcom coverage dataset.

The defining fact about Cranleigh is one the data states plainly: there is no railway station within 4 km of the centre of the built-up area.1 Every other town in this series has one within 1.3 km. There are 52 recorded bus stops within 2 km, and one GP surgery.2 That isolation shapes the price, the broadband and the buyer profile, and it is the first thing to reconcile with your own commute.

The six-dimension summary

Dimension Cranleigh (GU6) Source
Median sold price, 12 months to 31 Mar 2026 £575,000 across 249 sales HM Land Registry PPD3
Council tax, Band D 2026–27 £2,604.87 (Waverley) GOV.UK / VOA4
Schools within 2 km 6, of which 4 rated Good or Outstanding GIAS + Ofsted5
Recorded crime, 2025/26 36.7 per 1,000 residents (Waverley) Home Office + ONS6
Land in EA Flood Zone 3 within 2 km 5.1% EA Flood Map for Planning7
Premises with 100 Mbit/s or faster available 69.2% Ofcom Connected Nations 20258

Schools

Six schools sit within 2 km of the centre of Cranleigh, four of them currently rated Good or Outstanding.5 The state picture inside GU6 is genuinely mixed and needs reading rather than skimming: Glebelands School, the secondary, is Good (inspected March 2023); St Cuthbert Mayne Catholic Primary is Good (January 2023) and Park Mead Primary is Good (April 2015); but Cranleigh Church of England Primary School was rated Inadequate at its December 2022 inspection, and Ewhurst CofE Aided Infant School Requires improvement in February 2023. St Joseph’s Specialist Trust, a non-maintained special school, holds an Outstanding grade from June 2013.

The independent provision is substantial for a village: Cranleigh School and Duke of Kent School are both inside the outcode.

What to check. An Inadequate grade from December 2022 will have triggered a monitoring and intervention process since, and the current position may be materially different from the label — read the latest inspection documents, not the summary. Admissions are set by Surrey County Council, and in a village with one state secondary the catchment question is simpler than elsewhere but not automatic. How the Ofsted changes affect school ratings explains what the labels carry across framework changes.

Crime

Waverley recorded 5,036 offences against a resident population of 137,218 in the year to March 2026 — 36.7 per 1,000 residents, against an England figure of 80.3 per 1,000 computed across all 296 local authority areas in the same dataset.6 That is 54.3% below the England rate, and the lowest district figure of any town in this series by a wide margin.

Waverley is a large, low-density district covering Farnham, Godalming, Haslemere and the Weald villages. Even allowing for the fact that district aggregates smooth over real variation, a rate 54% below England is a strong signal rather than a rounding artefact. The population-weighted ranking of Surrey towns by crime rate puts the district in county context, and how we calculate crime rates sets out the method.

Broadband

Coverage tier GU6 (% of premises) Source
30 Mbit/s or faster 92.2% Ofcom Connected Nations 20258
100 Mbit/s or faster 69.2% —
300 Mbit/s or faster 69.2% —
Gigabit-capable 69.2% —
Unable to receive 30 Mbit/s 7.5% —

These are download-speed tiers, not technologies, and they nest: every premise counted at 300 Mbit/s is also counted at 100 and at 30.

This is the weakest broadband picture of the six towns here. 92.2% of GU6 premises can reach 30 Mbit/s or faster, against 99.0% in Banstead, and 7.5% — roughly one in thirteen — cannot reach 30 Mbit/s at all, the highest share of the six. On the 100 Mbit/s, 300 Mbit/s and gigabit tiers GU6 sits at 69.2%, level with Ashtead at the bottom of the group. The cause is structural: GU6 is a wide rural outcode where premises sit a long way from the nearest network infrastructure, and commercial build reaches the village core long before it reaches the lanes.

The averages above therefore conceal a real split. A house on the High Street and a house two miles out on a Weald lane are not in the same connectivity market. Our note on the outcodes where Surrey premises still cannot reach 30 Mbit/s covers the pattern, and the GU6 outcode page carries the GU6 broadband aggregate alongside the rest of the outcode data. For a working-from-home household this is the single most important pre-viewing check in Cranleigh.

Council tax

Cranleigh is billed by Waverley Borough Council, which has the highest Band D charge of the five Surrey districts in this series. The 2026–27 charges, including the Surrey County Council and police precepts, are:4

Band Annual charge 2026–27
C £2,315.44
D £2,604.87
E £3,183.73
F £3,762.59
G £4,341.45
H £5,209.74

One caveat: GU6 straddles the county boundary, spanning Waverley in Surrey and Chichester in West Sussex.9 A GU6 address is not automatically a Waverley address, and the charge differs. Confirm the billing authority as well as the band. Our Band D comparison across the Surrey districts shows where Waverley sits on the 2025-26 figures (the district order is unchanged for 2026-27).

Property market

Metric GU6, 12 months to 31 Mar 2026 Source
Median sold price £575,000 HM Land Registry PPD3
Mean sold price £653,049 —
Residential sales registered 249 —
Detached 121 sales, £740,000 median —
Semi-detached 68 sales, £502,000 median —
Flat or maisonette 31 sales, £290,000 median —
Terraced 29 sales, £410,000 median —

Cranleigh’s £575,000 median sits 13% above the Surrey county median of £510,000 over the same twelve months.3 The market is heavily detached: 121 of 249 registered sales — 49% — were detached houses, the highest share in this series, and they carry a £740,000 median against £290,000 for the 31 flats that changed hands. The mean sits £78,049 above the median, which tells you there is a long upper tail of country-house transactions above the typical sale.

On energy, GU6 holds 7,673 lodged EPC certificates, most commonly Band D, with 48% rated C or better.10 Older, larger, off-the-gas-grid rural stock is the main reason a village like this does not score higher.

Flood risk

Cranleigh’s river exposure is modest but not negligible. Of the land within 2 km of the centre of the built-up area, 5.1% falls in Environment Agency Flood Zone 3 and 2.4% in Flood Zone 2, driven by Cranleigh Waters and the surrounding Weald drainage.7 The Environment Agency holds one historical flood outline intersecting that area, dated 1968.7

Surface water is the layer to weigh more carefully. 1.9% of land within that radius sits in the Environment Agency’s high or medium surface-water likelihood bands.11 Weald clay sheds water rather than absorbing it, so intense rainfall produces run-off quickly — and a property can sit in Flood Zone 1 for river risk while still carrying a meaningful surface-water band. Our guide to reading surface-water risk and depth bands explains how to read that, and how we assess flood risk covers the full method.

Flood zones describe land, not buildings, and are modelled ignoring defences. Zone 3 is land with a 1% or greater annual chance of river flooding; Zone 2 is between 0.1% and 1%.

At the viewing stage

  • Given no station within 4 km, what is the realistic door-to-door commute, and does the property come with the parking that implies?
  • Can this address get 100 Mbit/s or faster, or is it one of the 7.5% of GU6 premises below 30 Mbit/s?
  • Is the address in Waverley or in Chichester district for council tax, and at what band?
  • What does the most recent inspection document say about the primary school serving this address, beyond the headline grade?
  • What is the surface-water likelihood band and modelled depth on this plot?
  • What have comparable detached properties sold for on this lane, against the £575,000 all-types median?

Further reading

Researching a specific property while you’re still viewing? A Property Report scopes the checks to that address: EPC and flood risk at the building, council tax band, broadband, the nearest schools, crime, air quality and environmental context, for £29.99. An Area Report covers the postcode for £24.99.

This article is general information only. It is not financial, legal, or property investment advice. Always obtain independent advice and carry out formal searches before committing to a purchase.

Footnotes

  1. Department for Transport NaPTAN public transport access node data, as held in the Home-Checker naptan_stops table. No stop with a rail mode falls within 4 km of the ONS 2022 built-up-area centroid for Cranleigh. ↩

  2. NHS Organisation Data Service epraccur GP practice register (active England practices), as held in the Home-Checker gp_surgeries table. Count is practices within 2 km of the ONS 2022 built-up-area centroid. ↩

  3. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, PPD category A residential transactions, 12 months from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, aggregated by postcode outcode from the Home-Checker land_registry_prices table. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Re-queried 28 September 2026 after the 18 September 2026 Land Registry reload (HMLR 2026-08-28 restatement). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. GOV.UK, “Council tax levels set by local authorities in England, 2026 to 2027” (published 25 March 2026), Table 9 — council tax by band for each billing authority. Charges include county and police precepts. ↩ ↩2

  5. DfE Get Information About Schools register plus Ofsted inspection outcomes, as held in the Home-Checker schools table (refreshed 1 September 2026). Counts are schools with a recorded location within 2 km of the ONS 2022 built-up-area centroid for Cranleigh. ↩ ↩2

  6. Home Office Police Recorded Crime, financial year 2025/26 (April 2025 to March 2026), joined to ONS mid-2025 population estimates. The England rate is total offences divided by total population across all 296 local authority rows in the same dataset. ↩ ↩2

  7. Environment Agency Flood Map for Planning (Flood Zones 2 and 3), dataset vintage 15 July 2026, plus the EA historic flood outlines. Shares are the proportion of land area within a 2 km radius of the ONS 2022 built-up-area centroid falling inside each zone polygon. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Ofcom Connected Nations 2025, published 19 November 2025, reporting coverage as at July 2025; loaded to the Home-Checker ofcom_broadband table on 18 September 2026. Each figure is the percentage of premises with that service available, averaged across the 559 GU6 postcodes present in that release. Ofcom does not publish full-fibre coverage at postcode level, so the 100 Mbit/s tier is a speed band, not a technology. Postcodes Ofcom retired between the 2024 and 2025 releases still sit in the table carrying their older values and are excluded from every figure here. ↩ ↩2

  9. ONS postcode directory via the postcodes.io outcode lookup, queried 17 September 2026. ↩

  10. MHCLG Energy Performance of Buildings data, aggregated by outcode and precomputed on 21 May 2026. ↩

  11. Environment Agency Risk of Flooding from Surface Water (NaFRA2), published 28 January 2025; high and medium likelihood bands combined, as a share of land area within the same 2 km radius. ↩

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