Guildford

Median gross weekly pay for full-time employees living in Guildford was £882.40 in 2025, against £914.10 for Surrey, £815.20 for the South East and £766.60 for Great Britain. On 2024 BRES figures, professional, scientific and technical activities account for 11,000 employee jobs, 13.1% of the borough total against 9.3% regionally; finance and insurance for 3,500 jobs, 4.2% against 2.5%; and information and communication for 6,000 jobs, 7.1% against 5.6%. There were 7,250 registered enterprises in 2025, 88.9% of them micro.

The council's economic development strategy of February 2023 identifies the Surrey Research Park, the university and the hospital as central to the borough's economy, and names professional services, IT, space and satellite, gaming and medical technology among its sectors. It treats the borough's agriculture and forestry as a separate rural element.

Some assets sit awkwardly with a standard will template: shares in a private company, options or deferred awards from a listed employer, intellectual property, and income taken through a personal company. If you hold any of them, the governing documents can affect how they transfer, and should be reviewed alongside the will.

The ONS provisional average house price for Guildford borough in June 2026 was £524,000. Census 2021 recorded 66.3% of households as owner occupied and 19.6% as privately renting.

Set beside Elmbridge borough, which contains Weybridge, at £744,000 on the same June 2026 series, the two boroughs are geographic neighbours in north-west Surrey with meaningfully different housing markets. Neither figure says anything about an individual household, and neither implies that a household has a tax liability.

If an estate is largely one property, the questions worth answering early are how the property is held, what a surviving spouse would need, how costs would be met before any sale, and what should happen where children's circumstances differ. A price on its own does not determine whether a straightforward will or something more involved suits you.

The borough's rural area includes agriculture and forestry, which the council's strategy treats separately from the town's professional economy. Where a family holds land, the estate-planning question is not how many acres there are but how each parcel is owned, who occupies it, what it is used for and for how long.

HMRC's guidance explains that agricultural relief, where it applies, is given against the agricultural value of land rather than the market value of a country home, and that its conditions turn on ownership, occupation, use and duration. Rather than assume how let land, a grazing licence or land farmed by someone else is treated, ask a specialist to assess each arrangement against HMRC's current conditions.

Bring a written schedule — titles, parcels, occupiers, agreements, uses and dates — and let a specialist assess it. We coordinate that introduction and do not assess reliefs or give tax advice ourselves.

A useful pack is: property and how it is held; company shares with the articles and any agreement; option or award statements; pension and life policy nominations; land titles and agreements; and the names of people you have asked to act as executor and attorney.

Lasting powers of attorney for property and financial affairs and for health and welfare are separate documents from a will, and each has to be made while you have the capacity to make that particular LPA. Without an appropriate arrangement in place, court involvement may be needed, depending on the decision and the circumstances. If you run a business, an LPA covering business decisions is worth raising specifically.

Whether inheritance tax arises depends on the whole estate, how it is held and who inherits — not on a borough average. Cromwell Associates takes the enquiry and introduces an appropriate specialist, and may receive a referral payment where an introduction proceeds; the specialist sets out their own scope, fees and terms.