What does HM Land Registry Price Paid exclude?

Price Paid covers most sold residential property in England & Wales, but not everything. It excludes transfers that weren’t a straightforward sale — most transfers to a company or under a court order, right-to-buy sales below market value, and transfers where no money changed hands. Sales that are never registered (some very old or unregistered titles) don’t appear either. So a street’s Price Paid list is the sold record, not a complete history of every home.

How often is it updated, and how current is it?

HM Land Registry publishes Price Paid monthly. A sale appears once it’s registered, which can lag the actual completion by weeks to a few months, so the most recent month or two is always partial and fills in later. Every figure on Acreright carries the vintage it was computed from; the changelog records each refresh.

What are category A and category B sales?

HM Land Registry tags each record. Category A is a standard full-market-value sale between unconnected parties. Category B covers transfers that may not reflect full market value — e.g. to a company, a repossession, or a buy-to-let portfolio transfer. Acreright shows both in a street’s history (category B is flagged), but every PRICE figure — medians, price trends, £/m² and 5-year changes — is computed from residential sales only: category-A, standard house/flat types (detached, semi, terraced, flat — never “Other”, which is commercial, land or block deals), priced at least £10,000. We clean the maths, not the record — so a £33.8M block transfer still appears in the sold list, labelled, but can’t masquerade as a home’s market price.

How is the 5-year price change worked out?

From pooled windows, not two single years: the median of a street’s residential sales in the last 24 months against the median of the 24 months five years earlier. Each window needs at least three qualifying sales; below that the change reads “—” rather than a figure a handful of sales can’t support. Pooling means an ordinary street — five to fifteen sales in a two-year window — gets a real, stable percentage instead of the noise a one-sale year would produce.

Why do your sale counts differ from a property portal?

Portals often count listings or asking prices; Acreright counts registered SOLD transactions from Price Paid. We also group by the Land Registry’s own street + postcode fields, which can split or merge a street differently from a portal’s map. And because registration lags, the latest weeks look lighter than they eventually will. Different source, different basis — not a discrepancy to reconcile.

Are the prices adjusted for inflation?

No. Every price, gain, loss and return on Acreright is nominal — actual pounds at the time of each sale, not adjusted for inflation. Over a long hold, inflation means even a nominal gain can be a real-terms loss; we label this everywhere it matters.

Home › Methodology

Methodology

Acreright brings scattered UK open data into one honest, sourced report per local area in England. This page explains exactly how each headline is computed, what powers it, and where it stops being reliable — because a figure you can't check is a figure you can't trust.

Principles

Honest by default. Every figure shows its source, date and coverage. Where the data runs out we say "not enough data" rather than show false confidence.
We aggregate, we don't own. Everything is already-public open data, credited on the attribution page. We add structure and honesty, not ownership.
Coverage is live and expanding across England — the current list is the sitemap, never a hard-coded claim.
Nothing is a valuation or advice. Estimates are labelled indicative; area-level checks are not a formal property search.

The "good to live" score

The score is a transparent heuristic, not a black box and not advice. Each scored theme earns a verdict tone from its own data, worth fixed points:

Verdict	Points
Good (green)	90
Neutral	70
Caution (amber)	55
Watch (red)	30

The score is the weighted average of those points across the scored themes, rescaled to 0–100 and labelled Excellent (≥80), Good (≥66), Mixed (≥52) or Worth a look. You can re-weight it to your own priorities (e.g. schools, commute, affordability) and the number recomputes live. Purely informational themes — who lives here (census), education, housing tenure, work, health & disability, planning and self-reported wellbeing — are shown but not scored, because they describe an area rather than rank it.

Verdict tiles

Each theme gets a plain-English verdict from its own figure against sensible thresholds or the benchmark of the areas we cover (e.g. £/m² vs the covered-area average). Every tile expands to a card carrying the exact number, its source and its date. For a sub-district area (neighbourhood or postcode sector), some figures are only published at local-authority level — those are shown but clearly badged "district-level (name)" so an inherited figure is never passed off as the neighbourhood's own.

Concierge shortlist

The concierge turns a plain-English request ("4-bed near a good grammar under £1m, 40 min to London") into a shortlist. A model parses the request into constraints; the data does the ranking — every area is scored against your budget, commute, schools and priorities using the same stored, sourced figures the reports show. Areas that don't fit are dropped or flagged (over budget / over commute); we don't invent matches, and each card links to the full sourced report.

Investment (buy-to-let) maths

The Investment Finder ranks covered areas for a property you describe. Purchase price comes from Land Registry Price Paid medians (by property type where there are enough sales, else all-property); rent from ONS private-rental figures. From those it computes, transparently:

Stamp duty (SDLT, incl. the additional-property surcharge), mortgage cost (interest-only or repayment), and running costs (management, voids, maintenance, insurance, service charge, fees);
Gross and net yield, monthly cashflow, cash-on-cash return, and the lender interest-cover ratio (ICR) against a stress rate; corporation tax when held in a company;
5-year capital-growth context from the UK House Price Index.

Value estimates are comparable-led (local £/m² × floor area) and always labelled "not a valuation". Every input is a number you can trace back to its source.

Repeat-sales market outcomes

The "Market performance / Has it been a good investment here?" block, the street lens and the insights tables all come from repeat sales: the same home appearing in HM Land Registry Price Paid more than once. Matching a purchase to a later resale of the same address lets us measure owner OUTCOMES — how often a home resold for less than the previous owner paid, the typical gain, the annualised return and how long people held.

How pairs are formed. Sales are matched on address (PAON + SAON + postcode) and paired in date order — each sale with the next sale of that home. We require the two transfers to be at least six months apart (the Case-Shiller interval filter) and of the same property type, which drops back-to-back transfers, part-exchanges and record artefacts.
Nominal, not real-terms. Every gain, loss and return figure is nominal — it is not adjusted for inflation. A home that "resold at a loss" sold for fewer pounds than it last cost; over a long hold, inflation means even a nominal gain can be a real-terms loss. We label this everywhere and may add an inflation toggle later.
Full-market sales only. Loss/gain/return figures use HM Land Registry category-A transfers (standard full-market-value sales); category-B transfers (which may not reflect full value) are excluded from the outcome maths and flagged in the street history.
No improvements adjustment. Address matching cannot see what changed between sales — an extension, a refurbishment or a conversion. A resale gain may reflect work done, not just the market. Treat the figures as market-level context, not a per-home valuation.
Small samples say "too few sales to say". A percentage is only shown when a cell has at least ten matched repeat-sale pairs; below that we show the honest count, never a shaky %. Street- and area-level figures inherit the same rule.
Coverage. National, regional and local-authority figures cover all of England from the full Price Paid corpus; the street lens covers the districts where address-level sold records are loaded. Postcode-district and -sector blocks are a current-window snapshot.

Sources & freshness

Headlines are drawn from official UK open data — HM Land Registry & EPC (prices), ONS Census (demographics), police.uk (crime), Ofsted/DfE (schools), NHS/OHID/CQC (health), the Environment Agency & Defra (air quality, flood & strategic noise), the English Indices of Deprivation, Ofcom (broadband), National Rail/OpenStreetMap (transport), Companies House (local economy), and local-authority sources (planning & council tax). Each figure carries its own date; datasets refresh on their own cadence. Full credits are on the attribution page.

Map geometry

Street pages draw the street’s real centreline and pin its sold homes from Ordnance Survey open data: OS Open Roads for the road geometry and OS Open UPRN for each property’s point (a join to our UPRN-keyed records — not a geocode). A street is matched to its OS centreline by name within its local authority; about 85% of streets match and show their highlighted line with every recorded sale pinned, while the rest fall back honestly to a location marker (their sale history is still listed in full). Roughly 95% of sale pins sit on a matched street. Postcode sectors outline their own area by dissolving their member neighbourhoods. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right; we refresh the OS layers on our own January/July cadence (the upstream data updates more often — we deliberately move slower and date what we show).

Freshest data. Most recently refreshed: EPC energy ratings (data to Aug 2026) · Schools & Ofsted (data to Aug 2026) · Rents (PIPR) (data to 22july2026) · Companies (local economy) (data to Jul 2026) · Rail timetable (data to Jul 2026) · Public health (OHID) (data to Jul 2026) · CQC care ratings (data to Jul 2026) · NHS facilities (data to Jul 2026) · Council political control (data to Jul 2026) · Sold prices (Price Paid) (data to Jun 2026). Awaiting an update: Food hygiene ratings, Police recorded crime, Sold prices (Price Paid), UK House Price Index — the source hasn’t published within its expected window; we show the last good data with its date until it does. See the full changelog, or the machine-readable list at /api/health.

Price Paid data — the quirks worth knowing

Sold-price figures come from HM Land Registry Price Paid — the authoritative record, but with a few well-known quirks. Here’s what they are, so a figure is never a surprise.

What does HM Land Registry Price Paid exclude?: Price Paid covers most sold residential property in England & Wales, but not everything. It excludes transfers that weren’t a straightforward sale — most transfers to a company or under a court order, right-to-buy sales below market value, and transfers where no money changed hands. Sales that are never registered (some very old or unregistered titles) don’t appear either. So a street’s Price Paid list is the sold record, not a complete history of every home.
How often is it updated, and how current is it?: HM Land Registry publishes Price Paid monthly. A sale appears once it’s registered, which can lag the actual completion by weeks to a few months, so the most recent month or two is always partial and fills in later. Every figure on Acreright carries the vintage it was computed from; the changelog records each refresh.
What are category A and category B sales?: HM Land Registry tags each record. Category A is a standard full-market-value sale between unconnected parties. Category B covers transfers that may not reflect full market value — e.g. to a company, a repossession, or a buy-to-let portfolio transfer. Acreright shows both in a street’s history (category B is flagged), but every PRICE figure — medians, price trends, £/m² and 5-year changes — is computed from residential sales only: category-A, standard house/flat types (detached, semi, terraced, flat — never “Other”, which is commercial, land or block deals), priced at least £10,000. We clean the maths, not the record — so a £33.8M block transfer still appears in the sold list, labelled, but can’t masquerade as a home’s market price.
How is the 5-year price change worked out?: From pooled windows, not two single years: the median of a street’s residential sales in the last 24 months against the median of the 24 months five years earlier. Each window needs at least three qualifying sales; below that the change reads “—” rather than a figure a handful of sales can’t support. Pooling means an ordinary street — five to fifteen sales in a two-year window — gets a real, stable percentage instead of the noise a one-sale year would produce.
Why do your sale counts differ from a property portal?: Portals often count listings or asking prices; Acreright counts registered SOLD transactions from Price Paid. We also group by the Land Registry’s own street + postcode fields, which can split or merge a street differently from a portal’s map. And because registration lags, the latest weeks look lighter than they eventually will. Different source, different basis — not a discrepancy to reconcile.
Are the prices adjusted for inflation?: No. Every price, gain, loss and return on Acreright is nominal — actual pounds at the time of each sale, not adjusted for inflation. Over a long hold, inflation means even a nominal gain can be a real-terms loss; we label this everywhere it matters.

Machine-readable data (.json twins)

Every public entity page has a machine-readable JSON twin at the same URL with .json appended — the whole sourced payload the page is built from, served with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * and a license block crediting each dataset. It's the supported way to consume Acreright data programmatically or to cite a figure with its provenance.

Area report — /area/{slug}.json: every theme (prices, crime, schools, transport, health, environment…) with its own source and date, plus the repeat-sales market block and the generated summary.
Postcode sector — /postcode/{sector}.json.
Any place (covered or not) — /places/{area}/{district}.json and …/{sector}.json: headline prices, deprivation, recent sales and coverage.

Each HTML page also advertises its twin with a <link rel="alternate" type="application/json"> tag and a Link: response header. The twins are cacheable and free to use under the licences on the attribution page; please credit Acreright and the underlying source. The bulk /api/* origin stays rate-limited and is not for crawling — use the twins.

Honest limits

Estimates are indicative, not valuations; the "buying here" checks are area-level signals, not a formal conveyancing search.
Some figures are only available at local-authority level and inherited down to neighbourhoods — always badged as such.
A few datasets carry an older vintage (e.g. the rail timetable) — the date on each figure is the honest guide.
Commute times use each area's representative station — the station nearest the area that has a direct weekday AM-peak train to the destination (a resident's actual nearest usable station, named on the figure) — not the fastest station anywhere in the district. The same figure appears on the area report, the Commute Finder and the /commute pages. Direct trains only; where there's no direct train we point to the National Rail journey planner rather than estimate an interchange.
Noise is Defra's strategic noise mapping (Round 4, 2022), which models major roads and railways only — not aircraft or general ambient sound. Lden is the annual day-evening-night average sound level (with a +5 dB evening and +10 dB night penalty for disturbance). We report the share of an area's postcodes inside a mapped ≥55 / ≥65 dB band, so an area with none simply has no mapped major road/railway nearby — that is not a "quiet area" rating.
Homes changing hands (turnover/liquidity) is the count of sales in the last 12 months as a share of the district's dwelling stock (ONS subnational dwelling stock, LAD-level). It reads how liquid a market is — how often homes trade — not a price forecast; it's district-level only (dwelling stock isn't published below the LAD).
£/m² divides a home's sold price by its floor area (from its EPC certificate), so it's a size-adjusted comparison the headline median can't give — but it only covers sales we can match to an EPC. The EPC band distribution counts the certificates on record for an area (not every home has one), so read it as the mix of assessed homes, not the whole stock.
The local economy figures count companies by their registered office (Companies House), which is where a company is legally registered — not necessarily where it trades. Formation agents and accountants register many companies at one address, so we exclude bulk-registration postcodes from street and sector counts and always say "registered here".
Coverage is expanding; an area we don't cover yet isn't a judgement on it.

← Back to Acreright · Attribution & licences →