HM Land Registry Price Paid Data explained: what is included and what is not

Price Paid Data is the single most useful open dataset in British property, and the most frequently misread. It records the price and address of registered property sales in England and Wales, running from January 1995 to roughly 30 million transactions today, refreshed monthly around the 20th. It is free, it is granular down to an individual door, and it is missing several things that people assume are in it.

What the dataset is, in one paragraph

When property changes hands and the new owner is registered, the transfer states a consideration. HM Land Registry captures that figure with the address and the date, then publishes it. The dataset is therefore a by-product of a legal register rather than a market survey: nobody chose which sales to sample, and nobody adjusted anything for quality. What was registered is what appears, and what was not registered does not exist as far as the file is concerned.

The fields, one by one

The field that is not there

The important omission is size. There is no floor area, no room count and no plot dimension anywhere in the file, so price per square metre, the only honest way to compare two homes, has to be assembled by joining the address to another source such as the energy certificate register. Anyone quoting a price per square metre from Land Registry data alone has done that join, guessed, or made it up.

Category A and category B entries

Every row carries a category flag, and it changes what the row means. Category A is the standard entry: a single residential property, sold for value at full market value, transferred by a normal conveyance. That is the population most people picture when they think of sold prices, and it is the one that supports comparison.

Category B is the additional entry, added to the published file in October 2013 to make it more complete. It covers transfers under a power of sale, which is to say repossessions, buy to let purchases where a mortgage identifies them as such, and transfers to buyers who are not private individuals. These are real transactions at real prices, and they are also a different market with different pressures, which is why our own statistics exclude them. The detail is in repossessions and category B transactions.

What is deliberately excluded

• Transfers that are not sales at market value: gifts, transfers for no consideration and transfers between parties where no price was paid.
• Right to buy sales at a discount, because the recorded figure would understate what the property was worth.
• Transfers under a court order, and compulsory purchases by public bodies.
• Sales of property in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which fall under entirely separate registration systems.
• Anything that was never lodged for registration, along with certain transfers of unregistered land.

These exclusions are a feature. A dataset that included discounted family transfers would be useless for valuation, since a house handed to a daughter for a pound would sit in the same column as the identical house next door sold for four hundred thousand. The cost of the exclusions is that transaction counts for a street are always slightly lower than the number of doors that changed hands.

How the data is published

HM Land Registry offers the same records in several shapes. There is a search interface for one address at a time, a monthly update file containing additions, changes and deletions since the previous release, annual files, a complete single file covering the whole series since 1995, and a linked data service for querying it programmatically. The Price Paid Data downloads page is the entry point for all of them.

The monthly rhythm matters more than it looks. Because registration lags completion, each release both adds new sales and revises recent months, so a figure you quoted in July can legitimately change in September. Treat the two most recent months as provisional in any analysis, a point developed in how long a sale takes to appear.

Licence, attribution and reuse

The data is Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Reuse, including commercial reuse, is permitted with attribution, and the required form of words is: Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Note also that address data carries its own constraints in the UK, which is why responsible services display addresses without offering bulk address downloads.

Sources: the Price Paid Data collection and the official guidance page define every field and every exclusion described above. Our UK sold prices tool reads from the same file, with category B entries filtered out of the published medians.