How to check what a house sold for in England and Wales

Every home sold in England and Wales leaves a public trace. When a sale completes and the buyer is registered as the new owner, HM Land Registry records the price paid alongside the address, the completion date and a short list of other fields. That file is called Price Paid Data, it begins in January 1995, and it now holds roughly 30 million transactions. Looking up any of them costs nothing.

What people usually want from it is simple: the number the neighbours actually got, so the number being asked next door can be judged against something real. The data answers that question well. It answers a few other questions badly, and knowing which is which is the difference between a useful search and a confident mistake.

Where a sold price actually comes from

The figure is not an estimate, an automated valuation or an agent opinion. It is the consideration recorded on the transfer deed when ownership changed hands, lodged by the conveyancer and captured at registration. HM Land Registry refreshes the published file monthly, normally around the 20th, adding the sales registered since the previous release along with corrections to earlier ones.

The geography is fixed, and worth learning before you start searching. Price Paid Data covers England and Wales. Scotland has its own register run by Registers of Scotland, and Northern Ireland has no open equivalent, which is why a search for a flat in Glasgow or Belfast returns nothing at all rather than an empty result you can interpret. That gap has its own explanation of Scottish and Northern Irish coverage.

Three ways to look up a sold price

1. The official route: the Search house prices service on gov.uk. Enter a postcode or a street, set a date range, and the raw entries come back. It is authoritative, free and deliberately plain, which is fine for one address and tiring for twenty.
2. The bulk route: HM Land Registry publishes monthly, annual and complete files, plus a linked data service, so the whole national series can be downloaded and analysed. Excellent for research, heavy going if all you wanted was the house on the corner.
3. The joined route: use our UK sold prices pages, where the same official entries are already grouped by street and area with medians and transaction counts, so a road reads as a pattern rather than as a list of rows.

All three read the same underlying file, so they cannot disagree about a price. They can disagree about recency, because each rebuilds on its own schedule after the monthly refresh, and they can disagree about how an address is spelled, because the address in the record is the one written on the deed rather than the one on the letterbox.

What one record actually contains

Now read that table for what is absent. There is no floor area, no bedroom count, no plot size, no condition, no photograph and no note that the roof was replaced in 2019. A price with no size attached is a number without a denominator, and that single omission causes more bad conclusions than anything else in the dataset. The usual workaround is the Energy Performance Certificate register, which carries total floor area for most homes marketed since 2008 and can be joined to the address by hand. The method sits in our guide to valuing a home from comparable sales, and the full field-by-field breakdown is in Price Paid Data explained.

Why the address you want may not be there

• The sale is too recent. Registration usually trails completion by two weeks to two months, and awkward cases take longer, so the past two months of data are always provisional.
• It was not a market sale. Gifts, transfers between family members for no consideration, right to buy sales at a discount, transfers ordered by a court and compulsory purchases are excluded by design rather than by accident.
• The address has changed identity. New build plots are often registered under a plot number or a developer street name that only later becomes the postal address on the door.
• The postcode field is blank, which happens in a small share of records and quietly defeats a postcode-only search.
• The property is in Scotland or Northern Ireland, where this dataset simply does not reach.

None of those absences mean a sale was hidden. They mean the register records transfers of ownership for a legal purpose, and price publication is a by-product of that purpose rather than the point of it. If a sale you witnessed with your own eyes is missing, timing is the first suspect: read how long a sale takes to appear on the register before assuming anything stranger.

Reading one price without fooling yourself

A single record is an anecdote. It tells you what one buyer paid one seller on one day, under conditions you cannot see: a divorce, a probate deadline, a chain collapsing, a sealed bid against four rivals, or a quiet sale to a tenant who never went to market. Build an argument on one number and you are arguing about a stranger, not about a market.

Three or four sales of similar homes on the same street within a year or so start to behave differently. Individual circumstances scatter, the middle of the range firms up, and the outliers become interesting rather than misleading, because you can usually work out what made them odd. That is the standard the surveyors apply, and it is available to anyone with an afternoon and a spreadsheet.

Licence, attribution and the limits of use

Price Paid Data is Crown copyright and database right, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. You may copy it, adapt it and republish it, including commercially, as long as the source is attributed. The wording to use is: Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

One caution about people rather than property. A price attached to an address on a date says something about whoever lived there, even though no names appear in the file. Treat the records as market evidence, not as a way of researching an individual, and if a specific entry causes a real problem for you, ask us to suppress it rather than assuming public means permanent.

Sources and further reading: the official guidance on Price Paid Data sets out the field definitions and exclusions, HM Land Registry publishes the monthly releases, and our UK sold prices tool presents the same records street by street.