The UK House Price Index: how house prices are tracked

The average house price in the UK was £273,000 in July 2026, according to the official UK House Price Index, an increase of 1.4% over the previous 12 months¹. That figure is a provisional estimate, and it moves around as later data arrives: the same index put the average at £268,000 for January 2026, £270,000 for April and £272,000 for June².

The UK House Price Index (HPI) is the government's measure of house price inflation, calculated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) together with Land & Property Services and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency⁴. It is built from completed sales recorded by the land registries in each nation, which means it counts what homes actually sold for, whether the buyer paid cash or took out a mortgage.

Average UK house price: about £273,000 in July 2026

The headline number people see in the news is the UK-wide average of completed sales in a single month. Over the first half of 2026 it moved in a narrow band, from £268,000 to £273,000, with annual growth between roughly 1% and 3.8% depending on the month and how complete the data was at the time¹.

Two things explain the jerky pattern in the annual growth column. First, each month's figure is published twice over: once as a first estimate and again, revised, as more sales are registered. The April figure of 3.8% was later revised down, and the May release noted growth of 2.7% was "down from the revised estimate of 3.9% in the 12 months to April 2026"². Second, the average is not adjusted for the mix of homes sold in a given month, so a month with more flats than usual can read lower than a month with more detached houses. Seasonally adjusted series exist, but only at regional and national levels⁴.

For context over the longer run, a House of Commons Treasury committee report noted that average UK house prices have risen by more than 30% since the Lifetime ISA was introduced in April 2017, according to the UK House Price Index¹⁰. The Bank of England notes that, even allowing for general inflation, house prices are now around three times as expensive as they were in the late 1970s¹¹.

What the UK House Price Index measures

The UK House Price Index measures house price inflation: how the price of the average home changes over time⁹. It is not a survey of asking prices or valuations. It uses administrative sales data collected on residential housing transactions, whether for cash or with a mortgage¹², and it is based on completed housing transactions¹³.

Its coverage is broader than most other house price measures:

• It covers purchases at market value for owner-occupation and buy-to-let⁴.
• It excludes purchases not at market value, such as re-mortgages, where the "price" represents a valuation rather than a genuine sale⁴.
• Cash purchases are included, because the data comes from the land registries rather than from mortgage lenders¹².

The index is a National Statistic, which means it has been assessed as meeting the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value expected of official figures¹⁴. The underlying data is supplied by HM Land Registry, Registers of Scotland, Land & Property Services and the Valuation Office Agency⁴. HM Land Registry itself is a government department created in 1862; its Land Register contains more than 27 million titles covering more than 90% of the land mass of England and Wales, and it safeguards land and property ownership valued at nearly £9 trillion².

Because the index counts completed sales, it lags the market. A house purchase typically takes 6 to 8 weeks to reach completion, and the sale must then be registered before it enters the data¹³. So a July figure published in September describes agreements made, in the main, in late spring.

How the average is calculated: a hedonic model that adjusts for property type

The average is not a simple mean of everything sold in a month. The UK HPI estimates average sold property prices using a geometric mean, calculated with a hedonic model that adjusts for property characteristics¹². In plain terms, the model works out how much each feature of a home, its type, its size, its location, contributes to its price, and then uses that to compare like with like across months.

The index applies a hedonic regression model to the various sources of data on property price, including HM Land Registry's Price Paid Dataset, to produce estimates of the change in house prices each month⁴. This matters because the raw mix of sales changes from month to month. If January happens to be heavy with London flats and February with Scottish detached houses, a naive average would fall and then jump for reasons that have nothing to do with any home changing value. The hedonic model strips that out, so the index tracks price change rather than mix change.

The published averages are rounded figures, so a headline number such as £293,000 for England is an estimate of the average, not a precise measurement⁴. That is precise enough for tracking the market, but it is not a statement about any individual house: two homes on the same street can sell tens of thousands of pounds apart.

Average prices across England, London and the rest of the UK

Averages differ sharply by nation and region, which is why the single UK figure is only a starting point. In July 2026 the average house price in England was £293,000, up 1.1% (£3,000) on the year¹. London sits far above that: the average house price in London in July 2026 was £569,000, which is £19,000 below the recent peak of July 2025⁵. Earlier in the year the London average was £553,000 in April 2026, against a UK average of £270,000¹³.

Northern Ireland, by contrast, is the cheapest part of the UK on average, at £202,000 in the second quarter of 2026⁵. Median figures for the financial year ending 2024 show the same spread: the median home sold for £290,000 in England, £200,000 in Wales, £185,000 in Scotland and £168,000 in Northern Ireland¹⁶.

Affordability ratios put those prices against incomes. In the financial year ending 2024, the median house price to disposable household income ratio was 7.9 in England, 5.4 in Wales, 5.3 in Scotland and 4.6 in Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland was the only UK country where homes sold for less than five times average household income¹⁶. A separate ONS measure for England and Wales calculates affordability ratios by dividing house prices by gross annual residence-based earnings¹⁷. In England the ratio of average house price to average earnings peaked at 9.06 in 2021 and had declined to 7.63 by 2025¹⁸.

First-time buyers pay less than the overall average, because they typically buy cheaper homes. The index reports average prices by buyer status:

Research by Zoopla in November 2025 compared average salaries with average house prices across UK towns and found that a household of two people each earning the average full-time local salary would need around 4.4 times their income to buy the average-priced home²¹. For London specifically, guidance on buying in the city notes the April 2026 average of £553,000 was considerably higher than the UK figure¹⁵.

New build prices: reported, paused, and reported again

Until early 2026 the index published separate averages for new build homes and existing resold property. That has stopped. From the March 2026 release the publishers stated: "We are not publishing average price and percentage change for new builds and existing resold property as done previously" because there are not currently enough new build transactions to provide a reliable result⁸.

The earlier figures show why new builds were worth separating out. They consistently averaged well above existing homes in England:

New build prices are also more volatile month to month, partly because incentives such as fixtures and fittings packages can be bundled into the recorded price. The December 2025 figures showed new builds up 4.7% on the year but down 7.2% on the month⁶.

The publishers have also changed how new build prices are estimated. On 20 August 2025 an improvement to the HPI's imputation method for Great Britain was introduced, which reduces the initial overestimation of new build estimates⁵. So new build figures published before that date are not built quite the same way as later ones.

Why recent figures get revised

Every UK HPI figure you read for the most recent months is provisional. Estimates for the latest 12 months are subject to revision⁵, and the revision period has been extended to 13 months following a review of the revision policy⁴. In practice that means a figure first published this month can still be adjusted for over a year.

The reason is the time sales take to reach the data. First estimates are based on only part of the eventual sales: the June 2026 first estimates reflected around 47% of all sales in Great Britain⁹, and the July 2026 first estimates around 50%⁵. As the remaining completions are registered, the average and the growth rate are recalculated.

The revisions can be substantial. UK house prices were reported as growing 3.8% in the year to April 2026 on a provisional basis³, but by the May release the revised April figure was 3.9% and the May figure itself came in at 2.7%². The March 2026 release reported UK prices static on the year, down from a revised estimate of 1.7% for February⁸. The July figure of 1.4% was itself an upward revision of the June estimate, from 2.0% provisional to 1.5% revised⁴.

Northern Ireland figures are quarterly, not monthly

Northern Ireland is the one part of the UK where the index does not publish monthly figures. Monthly data is not available for Northern Ireland; figures are released each quarter²². This is because the registration system there takes longer to supply completed transactions, so the publishers wait and release a quarterly average instead.

The quarterly figures show Northern Ireland as the fastest-growing part of the UK in 2026:

The average house price for Northern Ireland was £196,000 in Quarter 4 (October to December) 2025, up 7.5% (£14,000) on the same quarter a year earlier⁷. It was £198,000 in Quarter 1 (January to March) 2026, up 7.4% (£14,000)³, and £202,000 in Quarter 2 (April to June) 2026, up 9.2% (£17,000)⁵. Northern Ireland House Price Index reports are published separately, for example "Northern Ireland House Price Index: January to March 2026"²³.

That growth has not made Northern Ireland expensive in absolute terms. As noted above, its median house price to disposable household income ratio of 4.6 in the financial year ending 2024 was the lowest of the four nations, and Northern Ireland's incomes have increased more quickly than house prices in each of the last five years¹⁶.

UK HPI or Zoopla: why the averages differ

Headlines about house prices come from several different measures, and they can disagree in the same month. The main reason is what each one counts.

The UK HPI counts completed sales, cash and mortgage alike, from the land registries¹². Lender indices count only their own mortgage approvals, so they exclude cash buyers entirely. The ONS notes that the Nationwide House Price Index, for example, "is based on mortgage approval data" and is not directly comparable with measures built on completed transactions²⁴. Property portals such as Zoopla and Rightmove work from asking prices or their own listing data, which sit ahead of the market and can differ from achieved prices.

Each type of measure has a use. Lender indices appear sooner, because a mortgage approval precedes a completed sale, so they give an earlier signal. The UK HPI is slower but more complete, and it is the measure used for official statistics. Portal data tells you what sellers are asking, not what buyers are paying.

The gap between asking prices and achieved prices can be large at the level of an individual home. A survey reported in April 2025 found that 13% of homeowners were disappointed to find their home was worth less than they had anticipated, by an average of £47,000²⁵. Averages, whether official or commercial, are a guide to an area, not a valuation of a particular property.

Using the data: release dates and downloadable files

The UK House Price Index is published on the second or third Wednesday of each month, with Northern Ireland figures updated quarterly⁴. Each release covers the month roughly six to seven weeks earlier: for example, the June 2026 UK HPI was published at 9:30am on Wednesday 19 August 2026².

All the data is published as CSV files that can be downloaded without charge¹⁴. The June 2026 release included the following files¹⁴:

The monthly reports contain the headline statistics, price changes, sales volumes, property status, buyer status, funding status and repossession volumes²³.

How far back the data goes depends on where you look. Under the UK HPI, data is available from 1995 for England and Wales, 2004 for Scotland and 2005 for Northern Ireland¹⁴. A longer back series, derived using the historic path of the earlier ONS house price index, extends the figures back to 1968²⁶. So both recent months and half a century of history can be downloaded in the same files.

House price figures feed into many other official statistics, from housing affordability to household wealth, and they are one of the numbers watched when judging the wider economy, alongside inflation and Bank Rate. If you are trying to work out what a move might cost you, the guides to buying a home and mortgages cover the steps that follow from the numbers.