Top 5 cheapest cities to open a shop in the UK

Soaring inflation and high costs of goods is impacting the UK’s shopkeepers and community retailers, with record closures during the pandemic having seen little recovery. Vacancy rates remain high, as many town centres are failing to lure brands to open stores, who instead can sell online and reduce overheads from having a physical space.

But as research has shown, while consumer may have adopted e-commerce, they have also shown a preference to shop omni-channel and relish the flexibility to purchase and return as they please.

New research by Small Business Prices (SBP) shows opening a store may not be expensive as many consider it to be, if companies are flexible on location. SBP analysed the average rental prices of retail spaces and the price of hiring contractors in various UK locations to reveal the cheapest cities to open a brick-and-mortar shop.

Swindon tops the list of cheapest cities

The top five cheapest UK cities to open a retail brick-and-mortar business are Swindon, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent, Sheffield and Aberdeen.

The average rent and buying of commercial spaces was determined by scraping Zoopla and the results were filtered by city and properties sized between 100 sq. ft - 750 sq. ft for rental and between 100 sq. ft and 1000 sq. ft for buying.

Swindon was revealed as the cheapest location to hire a contractor, with Stoke-on-Trent offering the lowest commercial space rental costs, averaging 6,510 pounds per month, although spaces are available as cheaply as 791 pounds for a 1,630 sq. ft retail space on the high street.

Manchester is the cheapest city to buy a commercial space, with the average cost for a 100-1,000 sq. ft. premises being 50,000 pounds.

Small Business Prices said it analysed business costs for the 30 most populous cities across the UK to reveal the cheapest location to open a brick and mortar shop. The company looked at the average hourly price of hiring contractors e.g builders, electricians, plumbers etc. to carry out work on the retail space per city. Where city specific data was not available, the national average was taken. Other metrics included high street footfall data for each city, the monthly average rent for commercial spaces and the average price to buy commercial spaces in each city.