{"id":728030,"date":"2026-08-05T07:30:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T07:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/728030\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T07:30:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T07:30:19","slug":"the-cost-of-being-single-and-how-friends-are-teaming-up-to-beat-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/728030\/","title":{"rendered":"The cost of being single \u2013 and how friends are teaming up to beat it"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Leanne split up with her partner in her late 20s she thought she’d have to put her dream of a buying a home in the area where she grew up on hold.<\/p>\n

She was earning a good salary but the properties she was hoping for – with a garden and parking space – were too expensive on her own. While she’d just started seeing someone new, it was very early days – far too early to discuss living together.<\/p>\n

Her friend since school, Sarah, was single and renting a room in a shared house in Brighton. She also wanted to move back home to Kent, but was worried about how she’d get on the housing ladder on her cabin crew salary.<\/p>\n

When Sarah suggested they buy together, Leanne admits she “totally baulked”. But after chatting with a mortgage adviser they went ahead – and say it’s helped them avoid the so-called singles tax.<\/p>\n

Not being partnered up can mean extra costs. It’s tricky to quantify and varies by location – estimates suggest it could be anything from hundreds of pounds to \u00a310,000 on average extra, external<\/a> a year.<\/p>\n

The cost of rent or a mortgage, household bills and subscriptions can’t be shared. And a single person pays 25% less council tax than a couple – not half.<\/p>\n

Many discounts involve pairing up – 2-for-1 cinema tickets, Two-Together railcards, couples gym memberships – plus solo travellers often pay a single person supplement.<\/p>\n

This affects a lot of people. Some 18.5m people had never been married or in a civil partnership in 2024 \u2013 36.8% of the population aged 16 and over, official figures show.<\/p>\n

And overall 8.6m people were estimated to be living alone in the UK last year – that’s nearly a third of all households.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Leanne split up with her partner in her late 20s she thought she’d have to put her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":728031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-728030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}