Rightmove, Zoopla or OnTheMarket: which portals to pay for.

Start with what Rightmove says about itself, because it publishes more than the other two put together.

• Audience. In its results for the first half of 2026, Rightmove reported 90% of time spent on UK property portals in June 2026 by Comscore’s measure, which compares it with Zoopla, PrimeLocation and OnTheMarket, and 75% by SimilarWeb and Sensor Tower. People spent 8.4 billion minutes on Rightmove in the half, down from 9.1 billion a year earlier, which it puts down to less property browsing across the UK.
• Advertisers. 16,591 agency branches at 30 June 2026, up from 16,385 at the end of 2025.
• Average spend. Agency advertisers paid an average of £1,636 a month in the first half of 2026, up from £1,520 in the same half of 2025. For the whole of 2025 the figure was £1,530.
• How it prices. There is no public price list. Agencies buy a package, and the April 2026 product guidelines define a “package threshold” as your minimum spend on products to stay eligible for that package. Rightmove’s 2025 results say 52% of agents spent above their monthly commitment on extra products, and by June 2026 36% of independent agents were on its top package, Optimiser Edge.
• Loyalty. Rightmove reported 96% retention of estate agency partners in the half, which it describes as its highest for over ten years.

In our view, that share of portal time is why most sales agencies treat Rightmove as fixed and argue about the second portal instead. Buyers search there, and Rightmove says people also use it to check local sold prices and property valuations. Leaving is possible, but it is a decision about your whole buyer pipeline, not a line in the marketing budget.

Zoopla is part of the Houseful group. What it publishes about itself comes from its statutory accounts, its press releases and its packages page.

• Money. Its announcement of its accounts for 2025, dated 8 September 2026, gives revenue of £83.2 million (£84.2 million in 2024) and a return to statutory profit.
• Audience. Its packages page says 9 million people visit Zoopla each month. Its accounts announcement says 6.4 million homeowners now track their property’s value on Zoopla, and that valuation leads to estate agents grew 25% year on year to the end of the first quarter of 2026.
• Pricing. In July 2026 Zoopla replaced its packages for smaller agencies, the first redesign in seven years, with three: Listing, Instruction and Complete. Each is tailored to the size of the agency, its local market and Zoopla’s performance in that area. No prices are published.
• Contracts. Some large groups sign long deals. In January 2026 Zoopla announced a five-year contract with Connells Group covering 1,263 branches.

In our view, Zoopla’s pitch has moved from buyers to vendors: it says its Prospect Plus product converts 43% of valuation leads to a listing over twelve months. It does not publish a share of portal time, a count of advertising branches or an average spend per agent in the accounts announcement or on its packages page. So you cannot set its fee against Rightmove’s average from published figures alone.

OnTheMarket has been owned by CoStar Group, the American property data company, since December 2023. CoStar reports it inside its residential business, so there are no OnTheMarket results as such.

• Advertisers. OnTheMarket’s own site says over 17,400 estate agency branches and new homes developments list with it, as of March 2026. That count mixes branches and developments, so it is not like for like with Rightmove’s 16,591 agency branches.
• Pricing. CoStar’s annual report for 2025 says OnTheMarket “hosts agents’ listings on a subscription basis”. It publishes no price list and no average revenue per advertiser.
• What is different. Its Only With Us scheme shows your new listings on OnTheMarket 24 hours or more before they reach Rightmove or Zoopla, and the agent chooses how long.
• What may change. CoStar’s annual report lists, among its priorities for 2026, deploying Homes.com in the UK by integrating OnTheMarket. If you sign a long contract, ask what happens to it if the brand or the product changes.

Here is what each portal publishes, side by side.

“Not published” means we could not find the figure in the results, accounts, press releases or agent pages each portal published up to September 2026.

With that little to compare, the decision has to come from your own figures. Our view of a sensible test:

1. Count leads by source in your CRM for the last twelve months: buyer enquiries, valuation requests and, most importantly, instructions that began with a portal lead.
2. Divide each portal’s fee by the instructions it started. A portal that sends plenty of buyer enquiries but no instructions is doing a different job from one that sends vendors.
3. Ask each portal for its figures in your postcodes, not nationally. The headline figures above are national.
4. Test before you commit. If a second portal offers a trial, use it to collect the numbers above. OnTheMarket’s own testimonials page quotes an agent who joined on a six month trial in 2024.

In our view, for most agencies this ends as Rightmove plus one, or Rightmove alone. A third portal is hard to justify unless it is winning instructions in your patch that the other two are not.

In our view, renewal is the one moment you have leverage, and the portals’ own terms tell you where it sits. Rightmove’s general terms say that after the initial term, the contract runs on until either side gives at least 30 days’ written notice, and that Rightmove may vary its charges after the initial term with 30 days’ notice. Its April 2026 product guidelines set minimum terms for many extra products, commonly three complete calendar months, and say that if your package ends you pay the standard price for core membership.

So, for any portal:

• When is my notice date, not my renewal date, and what minimum terms apply to each extra product?
• What is my package threshold, and what happens to my price if I fall below it?
• How many leads did you send me in each of the last twelve months, split into buyers, vendors and valuations?
• What is the price rise, and what is new for the money?
• How long is the contract, and what happens to it if the product or the brand changes?

Put the answers next to your CRM figures before you sign anything that runs for more than a year.

Every portal on this list is rented, and every one of them puts your listings next to your rivals’. None of them gives you a place online that is yours, that a vendor finds when they search your name, and that books a valuation straight into your diary. That job belongs to your own website, and we have set out the argument in whether an agency needs a website if it is on Rightmove.

The practical link to portal spend is this: every instruction your website wins directly is one you did not pay a portal to introduce. That is the work we do, bespoke websites for estate agencies, from £10,000 plus VAT, for one agency per patch, and the website is yours. How we design estate agent websites shows what goes into one, and the pricing page has the detail.

• Rightmove plc: Full year results for the year ended 31 December 2025
• Rightmove plc: Half year results for the six months ended 30 June 2026 (RNS)
• Rightmove: Advertise on Rightmove
• Rightmove: General Membership Terms and Conditions
• Rightmove: Product Guidelines, Estate Agency and Lettings, April 2026
• Zoopla: Zoopla doubles homeowner audience to over 6 million (statutory accounts for 2025)
• Zoopla: Zoopla overhauls SME membership packages
• Zoopla: Estate agent packages
• Zoopla: Connells Group commits to Zoopla with new five-year deal
• OnTheMarket Expert: What our advertisers are saying
• OnTheMarket: Only With Us
• CoStar Group: Annual report on Form 10-K for 2025

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.