England & Wales price per square metre in 2026: what the sold-price data shows

The median home sold in England and Wales over the last twelve months went for £295,000. Per square metre, the median is £3,385. The second number is the more useful one, because it does not move when the mix of what sold changes: 584,343 registered sales across 2,284 postcode districts, each one divided by the floor area on the property’s Energy Performance Certificate. This is a description of what the sold-price data says, not a forecast.

Price per square metre by region

The last column is the one worth staring at: how many square metres of local housing a single year of local median full-time earnings would buy, before any deposit, mortgage or tax. It collapses prices and wages into one figure, and it is the reason a £170,000 home in the North East is not simply “cheap”.

A year’s median earnings buys 16.4 m² of housing in the North East and 7.2 m² in London. London is 3.3 times the North East on price per square metre but only 1.4 times on earnings, and that gap — not the raw price — is what affordability actually means.

The ten-year picture: the North has closed the gap

Taking each district’s median £/m², averaging the first three quarters of the last decade and the three most recent complete quarters, and then taking the median across districts in each region:

• Wales — up 52.2% (157 districts)
• North West — up 51.5% (247 districts)
• West Midlands — up 47.4% (212 districts)
• Yorkshire and The Humber — up 46.4% (209 districts)
• East Midlands — up 44.3% (136 districts)
• South West — up 37.2% (261 districts)
• North East — up 37.2% (110 districts)
• East of England — up 28.0% (236 districts)
• South East — up 23.9% (367 districts)
• London — up 11.0% (226 districts)

Across all 2,161 districts with a full decade of matched sales the median rise is 36.3%. The ordering is almost a perfect inversion of the price table: the cheaper the region per square metre in 2016, the more it has risen since. Convergence, not divergence.

Where the biggest rises happened

The fastest districts are concentrated in the North West, starting from very low bases. Ten-year change in median £/m², current median shown in brackets:

• L4, Walton in Liverpool — up 113.4% (£1,590/m² today, 206 sales in 12 months)
• M9, Harpurhey in Manchester — up 111.2% (£2,587/m²)
• M40, Moston in Manchester — up 109.3% (£2,727/m²)
• OL8, Hollinwood in Oldham — up 107.7% (£2,293/m²)
• BB11, Burnley — up 102.4% (£1,484/m²)
• NP13, Blaina near Abertillery — up 99.3% (£1,546/m²)
• BL4, Farnworth in Bolton — up 98.7% (£2,303/m²)
• M19, Levenshulme in Manchester — up 91.6% (£3,333/m²)
• DL17, Chilton near Ferryhill — up 90.9% (£1,309/m²)

A doubling from £800/m² to £1,600/m² is not the same event as a doubling from £8,000 — in absolute terms these are still the cheapest districts in the country. But it is where a decade of price growth actually landed.

Where it went the other way

Of the 1,349 districts with a high confidence rating and at least 150 sales in the last 12 months, only 15 fell over the decade — and 14 of those are in London, most of them central: SW3, Chelsea down 13.8%, NW1, Marylebone down 10.3%, W8, Kensington down 9.9%, W2, Bayswater down 9.7%, SE1, Borough down 8.9% and E14, Isle of Dogs down 8.5%. The single exception outside the capital is RG1, Reading, down 2.7%.

The cheapest district in each region

Median price per m² over 12 months of registered sales, restricted to districts with at least 150 sales so the figures are stable:

• North East — SR8, Horden near Peterlee, £1,083/m² (355 sales)
• North West — FY1, Blackpool, £1,176/m² (303 sales)
• Yorkshire and The Humber — DN32, Old Clee in Grimsby, £1,173/m² (254 sales)
• Wales — CF45, Abercynon, £1,527/m² (155 sales)
• West Midlands — ST6, Stoke-on-Trent, £1,859/m² (554 sales)
• East of England — NR30, Caister-on-Sea, £1,903/m² (318 sales)
• East Midlands — DN21, Kirton in Lindsey, £1,938/m² (471 sales)
• South West — PL4, Mutley in Plymouth, £2,158/m² (356 sales)
• South East — CT17, River in Dover, £2,704/m² (220 sales)
• London — DA8, Northumberland Heath, £4,430/m² (227 sales)

The dearest district in the country on the same basis is SW3, Chelsea at £16,017/m² — 14.8 times SR8. That ratio is the real shape of the England and Wales housing market, and no national average price will show it to you.

What this measure can and cannot do

Price per square metre removes the size of the home from the comparison, which is most of the noise. It does not remove everything. A district median still partly reflects the mix of what sold in the period, so a quarter with more large houses reads higher; these figures are not mix-adjusted, unlike the official UK House Price Index. Floor areas come from EPC assessments, which do not exist for every sale and occasionally contain errors, so £/m² statistics rest on the matched subset while median prices use all sales. The most recent quarter is always incomplete because registrations lag completions by roughly two to eight weeks, and it is excluded from every growth figure above. And none of it is a statement about any individual property.

Sources

• Sold prices, sale counts and quarterly history: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, full-market (category A) residential sales, dataset anchored 30 Jun 2026. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Floor areas: Energy Performance of Buildings Register (England and Wales), matched to sales by address. Address data © Royal Mail.
• Earnings: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025, approximate median full-time gross annual earnings by region.
• Region and district geography: ONS Postcode Directory. Contains ONS and OS data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Growth method, filters, confidence levels and the incomplete-quarter rule: see the RealScout methodology page.