How we read the data

Where the numbers come from

• Sold prices: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, to 28 August 2026, rebuilt monthly. Open Government Licence v3.0. Sales appear once registered, which can be weeks after completion, so the newest sales are always incomplete.
• Official averages and 12-month change: the UK House Price Index (HM Land Registry and ONS), by region and for England.
• Council tax: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, by billing authority.
• Area deprivation: the English Indices of Deprivation 2025. England only.
• Schools, planning, crime and flood: the Department for Education register with Ofsted grades, planning.data.gov.uk and local authority registers, Police.uk and the Environment Agency.

Medians, windows and sample sizes

We quote the median (the middle sale), not the average, because a few expensive homes pull an average up. Each page states how many sales sit behind its figures and the dates they span.

• Postcode district pages use up to the 250 most recent recorded sales and state the first and last date. In a busy district that is only a few months; in a quiet one it can be years, and the page says so.
• City selling pages pool several representative districts and use the twelve months to the data date, counted by date, not by number of rows. We publish a city median only with at least 20 sales behind it.
• Twelve-month change compares the latest twelve months with the twelve before, and only when each period holds at least 30 sales and the data covers both in full. Otherwise the page omits it.
• A median from fewer than 30 sales is flagged as a rough guide.

Before October 2026, the city selling pages described the 250 newest sales of a single district as “the last 12 months”, which was wrong for most cities. That is corrected, and the numbers and labels now match.

Comparing with the official average

We set a district’s median beside the UK House Price Index average for its region and for England. The two are different measures: a median of recorded sales against a mean of all homes. The mean runs higher, because expensive homes pull it up. So “below the regional average” is a direction, not a precise gap, and we say so wherever we make the comparison.

How the area-profile (deprivation) sample is chosen

Deprivation is published for small areas, not for postcode districts, so a district has a spread of values, not one. For each district we look up up to 12 distinct full postcodes: the ones that most recently had a recorded sale. This is a convenience sample, not a random one, so it leans toward streets where homes are changing hands. Where fewer postcodes have sales, we use all of them and state the number. We report the spread and the median decile with that sample size, and never an invented single score. It describes neighbourhood context, never an individual home.

How “in plain English” and “our view” are written

These sections are produced from each place’s numbers by fixed rules we wrote and review, not by a language model at publishing time. A sentence appears only if the number behind it exists, so two places read differently because their data differs. “Our view” is opinion, labelled as opinion. For sellers it draws on how busy the market is, how varied prices are and which way they are moving. Where we mention a cash sale, we use our standard range of 70–85% of market value, and show what that means in pounds for the typical home.

Dates, updates and corrections

“Page data refreshed” is the date the Land Registry store behind the page was last rebuilt (7 October 2026 at the time of writing). We change it only when the data does, never to look fresher. If you spot a mistake, tell us. We correct it and, for anything material, note the change on the page.

Who is behind this

Your Property Check is built and run by a small team at Check Labs Ltd in Birmingham. See about us and how we value a home.