Cheap Hotels On Princes Street And In Edinburgh's New Town

Princes Street is the one street almost every visitor to Edinburgh walks down, and for good reason: the castle sits at one end of a garden-lined view, Waverley station sits below it, and the whole New Town grid spreads out behind it in straight, Georgian lines. For a budget traveller it is also the most practical base in the city. The street is flat, unlike most of the Old Town, the tram and a large share of the city's buses run along or under it, and the cheapest rooms in the area start lower than most visitors expect.

The New Town itself is the planned 18th-century extension to the medieval city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside the Old Town, built as a grid of broad streets and neoclassical terraces. It was originally residential; today it holds shops, banks and offices, with designer stores along George Street. That commercial character is precisely why it works for cheap stays: the offices empty in the evening, hotels and hostels fill the gaps between them, and the price per night often lands below the equivalent room a few hundred metres east in the Royal Mile's tenements.

This guide covers what a cheap room near Princes Street actually costs, where the budget options sit within the New Town grid, how the area compares with the Old Town on price, what transport from the area costs, and when the calendar turns against you. Prices throughout are low-season, from-price figures on the stated basis: hotels, aparthotels and guesthouses are a double room for two adults per night, hostels are one dorm bed per night.

Why Princes Street And The New Town Suit A Budget Trip

Princes Street and the New Town suit a budget trip because the cheapest double rooms start from £83 per night for two adults and the flat terrain spares you the Old Town's steep closes with a suitcase. The tram, most major bus routes and Waverley station sit within a short walk, and commercial streets mean hotel stock is not fighting festival venues for space.

The practical case for the area is transport. Trams stop at Princes Street and St Andrew Square every 7 minutes between 7am and 7pm, and every 10 minutes otherwise, seven days a week, with Waverley station adjacent to the eastern end of the street. A single adult tram fare within the city zone costs £2.40, and a City Day ticket costs £6.00, with a contactless daily cap of £5.70. Almost every Lothian bus route into the centre passes along or near the street as well.

The second case is noise. The Old Town carries the August festival: venues in the Cowgate and Grassmarket run until 3am in August, and tenement walls transmit it. The New Town is busy and commercial by day but quieter at night, with far fewer late venues per square metre. If your trip is not built around the festival, that difference is worth real money in sleep quality, and it costs nothing.

The third case is the price gap itself, which the next section sets out in numbers. Broadly: a double room in the New Town from £83 per night sits against Old Town budget hotels from £106, and the hostel picture is closer, with beds on both sides from the mid-teens. Where the New Town wins is consistency, because it has fewer festival venues competing for the same rooms in August.

For a wider view across the whole city, our budget hotels in Edinburgh guide covers every chain and independent option, and our cheap hotels in the city centre guide compares both halves of the centre together.

What A Cheap Room Near Princes Street Actually Costs

Near Princes Street, the verified low-season floor is £18 per night for a dorm bed at Princes Street Hostel, rising to £83 for a double room for two adults at Travelodge Edinburgh Central Queen Street, with the easyHotel Edinburgh double from £88 and aparthotel studios from £125, so roughly £65 separates a bed from a private room in the New Town at the bottom end.

The table below pulls the cheapest verified options in and immediately around the New Town and Princes Street. The basis matters: hostel figures are one dorm bed per night, hotel and aparthotel figures are a double room for two adults per night, all low-season from-prices.

Read the ratings with their review counts attached. A 4/5 from 101 reviews at the Travelodge is a solid budget-hotel score on a five-point scale; the easyHotel's 5.7 across 2,216 reviews reflects a chain built around very small, sometimes windowless rooms rather than a broken property. Neither number is comparable with the ten-point hostel scores beside them, which is why the scales are kept separate here.

The three cheapest verified ways to sleep in this area, at the time of writing, are the hostel bed, the chain double room and the compact budget-hotel double:

The Travelodge on Queen Street is the pick of the three for most first-time visitors: it sits a few minutes' walk north of Princes Street itself, on the quiet Georgian grid, and its £83 floor undercuts the Old Town's budget hotels by more than £20 on a like-for-like double-room basis. See current rates for Travelodge Edinburgh Central Queen Street before booking anywhere else in the area, because its price moves more than most with the season.

The easyHotel on Princes Street itself is the location play: rooms are compact, some without windows, but you sleep literally on the main street with the castle view outside the door. Check the room description carefully at checkout, and check whether breakfast and cancellation terms suit you before committing, because those details vary by rate.

How The New Town Price Gap Compares With The Old Town

On verified low-season floors, the New Town beats the Old Town on budget hotel doubles by roughly £23 per night, £83 against £106, while the Old Town wins narrowly on hostel beds, £18 in the New Town against beds from £10 in the Cowgate. The real gap opens in August, when Old Town rooms sit beside festival venues and climb harder, and in the quality of sleep, since the New Town has far fewer venues running past midnight.

The like-for-like comparison looks like this:

That hostel floor of £10 in the Old Town belongs to a Cowgate basement-style property, and it is genuinely the cheapest bed in the city centre. What you trade for it is noise and stairs. The New Town's £18 bed at Princes Street Hostel buys a quieter street and a flatter walk home.

For the full argument on both halves of the centre, read our Old Town or New Town comparison, which works through the trade-offs for different kinds of trip.

One honest caveat: the gap narrows or reverses during the August festival, when everything central sells out and prices converge upward. In late August the question is less "which side is cheaper" and more "what is still available", and booking tactics matter more than geography. The calendar section below covers exactly when that happens.

Getting Around From The New Town: Trams, Buses And Walking

A tram or bus single from the New Town costs £2.40 for an adult, a City Day ticket is £6.00, and the contactless daily cap is £5.70, with trams running every 7 minutes in the daytime and the airport tram taking under 35 minutes to reach the city centre. In practice most of central Edinburgh is walkable from Princes Street, and the money a New Town base saves on taxis is a real part of its value.

The fare numbers that matter, all current published fares:

Tram frequency and the airport journey time are published on the official tram timetable page, and the Airlink fares on the operator's own ticket pages. Both matter for a budget stay: from the New Town you can reach the airport for less than £8 without a taxi, which on a 5am departure is otherwise the default.

If you are driving in, note the Low Emission Zone. The city centre zone is enforced 24 hours a day, with cameras, and non-compliant petrol or diesel cars face a £60 initial penalty, per the council's LEZ page. Central on-street parking runs up to £9 per hour in the busiest zones. Our cheap hotels with parking guide covers where to sleep if the car is coming with you.

One recent change worth knowing: Princes Street itself reopened to pedestrians and road users on 28 August 2026, after being closed since 9 July following a fire in the former Debenhams building. If you read anything older describing the street as shut, that is out of date.

Aparthotel And Apartment Options Around The New Town

The cheapest aparthotel double room in the New Town starts at £125 per night for two adults at Stewart by Heeton Concept, with its sister property Heeton Concept Aparthotel Edinburgh from £142, and Old Town aparthotels from £132. Aparthotels in this area generally take one-night stays and run late or 24-hour reception, which suits the same short, central trips as the budget hotels, at a higher floor but with more space.

Aparthotels sit between a hotel and a self-catering flat: a proper double room or studio with kitchen facilities, hotel-style reception, and usually housekeeping included or charged separately. For a weekend they are rarely the cheapest option, but for a stay of four nights or more the ability to cook some meals pulls the total food bill down faster than the room rate goes up. The wider set of guides lives on Cheap Hotels Edinburgh.

Stewart by Heeton Concept is the value pick of the New Town pair. It carries an 8/10 rating across 2,042 reviews, sits within the Georgian grid a short walk north of Princes Street, and its £125 floor is £17 per night below its sister property. See current rates for Stewart by Heeton Concept if the kitchen-and-reception format suits your trip.

Heeton Concept Aparthotel Edinburgh, the sister property, runs from £142 per night for a double room for two adults and rates 8.1/10 across 3,587 reviews, a slightly larger review pool at a slightly higher price. The two properties trade places depending on dates, so it is worth checking both against the same nights.

Beyond the aparthotel format, the apartment listings in this area are a different product: individual short-term lets, priced by their hosts, with no held from-price, so the honest line is simply to see current rates for each. In the New Town, the George Street 2-Bed Apartment is rated 9/10 across 30 reviews and sits about 10 minutes' walk from Waverley. Over in Haymarket and the West End, the Stylish 1-Bed Flat scores 8.8/10 across 8 reviews. Both have tiny review pools, so treat the scores as weak evidence rather than strong.

Whatever you book in this format, check the licence number on the listing. A short-term let licence has been mandatory across Scotland since 1 October 2022, operating without one is a criminal offence with fines up to £2,500, and the licence number must appear on the listing itself. You can search it on the council's public register, which is updated at least monthly.

Hostel Beds On The New Town Side

A dorm bed on or beside the New Town starts at just £18 per night at Princes Street Hostel, rated 8.6/10 across 1,965 reviews, while Edinburgh Central Youth Hostel charges from £21.42 with a 9.2/10 rating across 935 reviews; both undercut every private room nearby by a wide margin and sit within walking distance of the tram, making them the cheapest central beds on this side of the city for a solo traveller.

Princes Street Hostel is the pure location play: on the main street itself, beds from £18, and an 8.6 rating across a large review pool. Edinburgh Central Youth Hostel costs a few pounds more per bed and carries the higher rating, 9.2 across 935 reviews, in a slightly less central but still walkable New Town position.

See current rates for Edinburgh Central Youth Hostel if the higher-rated bed appeals; the few pounds' difference per night is small against what a private room in the same area costs.

The hostel comparison across the whole city, including the Old Town beds from £10, is in our cheap hostels in Edinburgh guide, and our hostels with private rooms guide covers the middle option between a dorm bed and a hotel double.

When Prices Spike: A Booking Calendar For The New Town

The expensive windows around Princes Street are the Fringe in August, Hogmanay at the end of December, and the Six Nations rugby weekends in February and March, with advertised city averages climbing from a January floor of £111 to an August peak where occupancy hit 90.9% last year. Outside those windows, January through March and October through November are the cheap months, and the same room can cost half as much one month as the next.

The dated events a New Town booking needs to be planned around:

The market data behind that advice: the cheapest tracked month for advertised city hotel rates is January, averaging £111 for a double, against an annual average of £202 and an August where last year's occupancy reached 90.9%. Murrayfield concert and rugby weekends have produced spikes above 80% on the affected nights. Hogmanay is the UK's most expensive New Year's Eve destination on advertised rates.

The tactical reading is simple. Book August and late December as far ahead as you can, with multiple sources advising 9 to 12 months for festival value. For everything else, the January-to-March and October-to-November troughs are where the same New Town rooms sell at their floor.

The Visitor Levy And Other Small Print

The Edinburgh Visitor Levy is 5% of the room or bed price, charged before VAT and not on extras such as meals or parking, on the first five nights of a stay only, for stays from 24 July 2026 where the booking was made on or after 1 October 2025. On a £83 double room that is a little over £4 per night, and bookings made before 1 October 2025 for stays after the start date are exempt.

The details worth having at hand:

The levy is collected by the accommodation provider, or by the platform if the platform takes payment, and appears in the total price you see at booking, which UK rules require. Check the price summary at checkout rather than the headline rate. Recipients of listed disability benefits can claim the levy amount back from the council after the stay.

The other small print for a New Town stay is more ordinary. Check-in times and breakfast arrangements vary by property and rate, and both are things to confirm at checkout rather than assume. Cancellation terms likewise: refundable and non-refundable rates for the same room can differ by a wide margin, and the cheap non-refundable rate is only cheap if you actually take the trip. Our Edinburgh visitor levy guide works through the full rules.

Booking Tactics For The Lowest Rates In The New Town

To pay the floor rate near Princes Street, book in the January-to-March or October-to-November trough, compare the chain's own site against the platform price for the same room and dates, and lock August or Hogmanay rooms months ahead rather than weeks. Mid-week nights run cheaper than Fridays and Saturdays outside festival windows, and the same £83 double can double around the Christmas markets.

A few tactics that hold up in this area specifically.

First, use the grid. The New Town's streets are interchangeable in character, and a room one street back from Princes Street, on Queen Street or a side street off George Street, walks to the same places at a lower rate than an address on the main street itself. The Travelodge on Queen Street is the standing example: the same money buys less room on Princes Street itself.

Second, compare the total, not the headline. The levy, any breakfast charge and the cancellation terms all sit inside the final number. A £88 easyHotel room with no breakfast and a strict cancellation policy is a different purchase from an £83 Travelodge double with a looser rate, and the gap between them is smaller than the labels suggest.

Third, respect the calendar. The cheapest months are the boring ones, and there is no trick that beats simply travelling in February, outside the rugby weekends, or in November before the markets open on 14 November 2026. If your dates are fixed inside a spike window, book early: press and festival guidance consistently points to 9 to 12 months ahead for August, and Hogmanay's cheaper central options sell out by mid-autumn.

Fourth, do not overpay for centrality you do not need. Everything from Princes Street to the castle, Waverley and the Old Town is a walk of well under half an hour, and the official Old Town and New Town heritage listing describes just how compact the whole World Heritage Site is. A bed two streets north of Princes Street is still central Edinburgh.

Fifth, for a longer stay, price the aparthotel against the hotel with food in mind. The £125 Stewart floor is £42 above the Travelodge's £83, but a kitchen closes some of that gap on the second evening onward, and the five-night levy cap means the tax line stops growing after night five either way.

That is the whole picture: a flat, quiet-by-evening, transport-rich half of the centre whose floor prices are real, whose spikes are predictable, and whose cheapest rooms reward booking early in the year for the year ahead. Cheap Hotels Edinburgh tracks the rates in this area as they move, so the numbers above are worth rechecking against the live listings before you commit to dates.

Common Questions About Cheap Hotels On Princes Street And In The New Town