Price Per Square Foot in Upper Arlington, Ohio: 2026 Market Trends

Upper Arlington homes closed at a median $366 per square foot in 2026. That is the highest price per foot of any suburb in my central Ohio MLS extract, and it is being paid on houses built around 1955.

94 homes closed in Upper Arlington between January 1 and August 30, 2026, at a median sale price of $727,500. The median one went under contract in 3 days.

Those three numbers together are the whole story, and most of what gets written about this market misses it. People look at the sale price and say Upper Arlington is expensive. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what the price is attached to.

What is the price per square foot in Upper Arlington, Ohio?

$366, a median, from the Columbus MLS export I pull and dedupe myself. Twenty one flexmls extracts, deduped on List Number, data through August 30, 2026. Every number in this post is a closed sale, not an estimate and not a list price.

Here is how that sits against the rest of the metro over the same window. Same extract, same year, same method for every row.

Suburb	2026 closings	Median sale price	Median $/sq ft	Median year built
Upper Arlington	94	$727,500	$367	1955
Bexley	25	$796,500	$335	1937
Worthington	99	$500,000	$294	1967
New Albany	268	$587,500	$252	2004
Dublin	649	$560,000	$242	1998
Powell	488	$539,495	$237	2004
Sunbury	150	$547,900	$236	2017
Lewis Center	266	$527,320	$233	2004
Galena	151	$626,000	$231	2018
Westerville	849	$442,900	$228	1995
Gahanna	43	$435,000	$219	1988
Columbus	5,161	$287,000	$208	1963

Read the last two columns together. The two most expensive suburbs per square foot have the two oldest housing stocks. Galena's median sale was built in 2018 and trades at $231 a foot. Upper Arlington's median sale was built 63 years earlier and trades at $367.

That is not a rounding difference. It is 59 percent more per foot for a house that is six decades older.

Why does Upper Arlington cost more per foot than New Albany or Dublin?

You are not buying the structure. You are buying the lot, the street, the ride to downtown, and the fact that nobody is making more of any of it.

New construction can add supply anywhere there is dirt. Delaware County proves that every month. Upper Arlington has almost none. Two of the 94 sales in 2026 were new construction. The village-era street grid was laid out a century ago and it is built out, so the only way to add a house is to tear one down.

The lot is doing most of the pricing work, and per-square-foot math hides that. A 2,400 square foot Upper Arlington house and a 2,567 square foot New Albany house are not the same product, and the market is not confused about which one it wants at which price.

I run the price-per-foot number on every listing appointment for exactly this reason. It is the fastest way to show a seller what part of their number is the house and what part is the address. If you want the same read on a specific street, my entry-level versus luxury builder price-per-foot guide walks the same math through new construction.

How fast do homes sell in Upper Arlington?

A median of 3 days. Seventy four of the 94 closings went under contract within seven days of hitting the market.

That is faster than anything else in the table. Westerville ran a median 6 days, Dublin 6, New Albany 7, Powell 14, Sunbury 24. A $727,500 median with a 3 day median is an unusual pairing, and it tells you demand here is not price sensitive in the way people assume expensive markets are.

But the tail matters more than the median if you are the seller. Four homes took longer than 90 days, and the longest sat 348 days. Five more ran between 31 and 90. So roughly one in ten Upper Arlington listings did not get the three day treatment at all.

Nothing about the house changes on day four. The price does the work, and a first price that misses gets punished here faster than in a slower market, because buyers watching this inventory see everything the day it lists.

What does $727,500 actually buy in Upper Arlington?

A house built in 1955 with about 2,400 finished square feet. That is the median.

The distribution matters more than the midpoint, because a median in a market this wide is not describing a typical house so much as a middle of a very long line.

2026 sale price band	Closings	Share of the 94
Under $300,000	3	3 percent
$300,000 to $500,000	13	14 percent
$500,000 to $750,000	33	35 percent
$750,000 to $1,000,000	20	21 percent
$1,000,000 and up	25	27 percent

Sales ran from $225,000 to $4,000,000. More than a quarter of the market cleared seven figures.

The age mix is just as spread. Eighteen of the 94 were built before 1950. Sixty seven were built between 1950 and 1979. Only nine were built in 1980 or later. So the practical question on almost every Upper Arlington house is not whether it has been updated, it is which decade the updates are from and what the mechanicals are.

That is where a per-foot number stops being useful and an inspection starts. A 1955 house at $366 a foot with original galvanized supply lines and a 20 year old roof is a different purchase than the identical house down the street that had all of it done in 2021, and the MLS square footage is the same on both.

Do Upper Arlington sellers get their asking price?

Mostly, and then sometimes not at all.

The median sale closed at 100.3 percent of list price. Fifty of the 94 closed above asking.

Now the other number. Twenty five of the 94 closed below their ORIGINAL asking price, at a median $35,500 below it. That is the group that priced high, sat, cut, and then took what the market offered. In a market where the median home sells in three days, sitting is a signal, and buyers here read it correctly.

Twenty five of the 94 buyers paid cash.

So the honest read is not "sellers get their price." It is that Upper Arlington is a two outcome market. Price it where the closed comps are and you get bid up inside a week. Price it on hope and you give back $35,500 and two months. There is very little middle.

If you want to know which outcome your house is looking at, that is a comp question, not an opinion question. You can start with my home value tool and I will pull the closed set for your block behind it.

Is Upper Arlington a good buy at $366 a foot?

It depends entirely on what you are comparing it to, and the comparison most buyers make is the wrong one.

If you are comparing Upper Arlington to a new build in Delaware County on price per foot, Upper Arlington loses every time and it is not close. You will get more house, newer systems, and a builder warranty for $130 less per foot.

If you are comparing on land, location, and the supply that is never going to be added, the per-foot number is the wrong metric and you should stop using it. Nobody in New Albany is bidding on a 1929 Upper Arlington lot, because there is not one there to bid on.

Where the per-foot number earns its keep is INSIDE the market. Comparing an Upper Arlington house to other Upper Arlington houses at $366 tells you fast whether a specific listing is priced with the market or ahead of it. Comparing across suburbs mostly tells you that different suburbs sell different things.

For a cross-market read on speed rather than price, I keep a running Columbus suburb speed comparison, and Bexley and Worthington both have their own Bexley and Worthington pages with the same kind of detail.

How does this compare to the rest of central Ohio?

Columbus REALTORS reported a regional median sale price of $350,000 in July 2026, up 2.3 percent from $342,000 a year earlier, on 3,083 closed sales with 6,193 homes and condominiums in inventory and a 2.4 month supply.

Upper Arlington's 2026 median is 2.1 times the regional median. Its price per foot is 76 percent above the Columbus city figure of $208.

One caution on my own numbers, because it is the kind of thing that gets misread. The suburb table above is cross-sectional. It compares towns to each other inside calendar 2026. It is not a time series and I am not making a month-over-month claim from it, because my extract has uneven month coverage and a trend line off uneven coverage is a chart of my exports, not of the market. When I want direction, I use the Columbus REALTORS monthly report. When I want a submarket, I use the closed data above.

What this means if you are buying or selling here

If you are selling, your first price is the entire game. Three days or three months, $35,500 over or $35,500 under, and the fork is at list. Do not price off a portal estimate on a 1955 house, because the estimate cannot see which decade the kitchen is from.

If you are buying, budget the inspection like it matters, because at $366 a foot on seventy year old mechanicals it does. And be ready to move in days, not weekends. Seventy four of 94 homes were spoken for inside a week.

If you want the closed comps for one specific Upper Arlington street rather than the whole town, send me the address and I will pull them. The Upper Arlington suburb page has the standing detail, or grab a time on my calendar at calendly.com/adam-geuy and we will go through your number.

Thinking about buying or selling in Upper Arlington? Let's talk. Contact Adam Geuy at Blacktree Realty.

Data source: Columbus REALTORS MLS closed-sale exports, deduped on List Number, data through August 30, 2026. Regional figures per the Columbus REALTORS Central Ohio Housing Report for July 2026.