Prince William and Kate Middleton are paying rent. And it’s not cheap: The royal couple is handing over 307,200 British pounds a year (or around $410,000) for their new house, Forest Lodge, in Windsor. If you take them at the tabloid reports saying that this will be their forever home, and assume that the couple will reach their 80s, that’s somewhere north of 12 million pounds, or $16 million, over their lifetime. Or more. The rent will be reviewed every five years.
How do we know all of this? Likely because they wanted us to. The Prince and Princess of Wales registered documents with the UK’s Land Registry, which chronicles the ownership of land and property in England and Wales. Through it, you can request filings like deeds and leases of various properties—now including those of Forest Lodge, an eight-bedroom, Georgian-style home within the 4,800-acre Windsor Great Park.
The papers tell us a lot of things: There’s a main house and two cottages on the grounds, which are used for staff. The previous tenants were Alexander Fitzgibbons and his wife, Cristina Stenbeck. Fitzgibbons is known for being the chairman of event-planning firm Fait Accompli, which is the go-to wedding organizer within British aristocratic circles. Pippa Middleton and James Matthews, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and William and Kate themselves all used Fait Accompli for their weddings.
But most importantly, with the aforementioned financial information, they reveal that Forest Lodge was priced at a market rate: According to London’s The Times, the rent price came after valuations from Hamptons, Savills, and Knight Frank. (Knight Frank did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
The Prince and Princess of Wales accompany their children to Lambrook School in Ascot, near Windsor Castle.
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For years, the grand houses on the grounds home to Windsor Castle were known as “grace-and-favor residences,” or properties leased to friends, relatives, or employees of the British monarch for a nominal rent. The most famous—or, more accurately, infamous—grace-and-favor residence was Royal Lodge.
The 30-room Georgian estate was previously rented by former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who paid 1 million British pounds for the lease in 2003 and later put in another 7.5 million pounds for renovations. That was about it: A 2025 Times of London report found that he hadn’t made a standard rent payment for Royal Lodge in 20 years. According to the lease, each year he’d pay “one peppercorn (if demanded).”
