Methodology and limitations

• HM Land Registry Price Paid Data supplies recorded sale prices, transaction dates and broad property characteristics.
• Energy Performance Certificate data supplies recorded total floor areas where a sale can be matched confidently to a certificate.
• Postcode geography comes from the Office for National Statistics and Ordnance Survey. Other context, where applicable, comes from the Office for National Statistics, Valuation Office Agency, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Environment Agency and Bank of England.

Carucate currently covers England and Wales. Published market areas include postcode districts, built-up areas (towns and cities), local authorities, English regions, and England and Wales totals. Each level is an aggregate of the same eligible transactions, using its own evidence gates.

Signed-in research can also reach postcode sectors. These are a more granular research view, not a public search or API dataset; they are noindexed and subject to the same suppression rules. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not shown because their transaction and EPC sources are not comparable with this dataset.

The headline sale-price figure is the median of eligible transactions recorded in the trailing 24 months. A median is the middle sale price, so a small number of unusually high or low transactions has less influence than it would on an average.

We use standard residential Price Paid Data transactions with a usable geography and recorded price between £20,000 and £50,000,000. A headline requires at least 30 eligible sales in its trailing-24-month window. Individual chart points with fewer than five transactions are not given a median.

The default chart is a calendar-month median. We keep the full period selected by the user even when a month does not have enough sales: the price line breaks and an amber band marks that insufficient-data period. A blank point is not a zero price or zero sales result.

Rolling quarter and rolling 12-month controls use the exact median of eligible sales in the preceding three or 12 months ending in each chart month. They are not averages of monthly medians. These wider windows can be more useful in thin local markets, but they still obey the same minimum-evidence rule. Property type and floor-area filters can each be used with rolling charts, but not together.

Price per square metre is calculated for each confidently matched sale as recorded sale price divided by recorded EPC total floor area, then summarised as a median. It is not calculated by dividing an area-wide median price by an area-wide median floor area.

A postcode district must have EPC floor-area matches for at least 35% of its eligible recent sales, and at least 20 matched sales in total, before we show an all-market £/m² figure. Property-type £/m² uses its own stricter representativeness test: at least 10 EPC-linked sales covering at least 50% of the eligible type-specific sales. Individual size bands also need at least five matched sales. Where either test fails, we show price data without a £/m² estimate.

We show a filtered median only where at least five eligible sales are available for that published point. Headline property-type measures also use a trailing-24-month evidence check. Matching is deliberately conservative: ambiguous address matches are left unmatched rather than guessed, so coverage varies by geography and segment.

• Sale prices reflect the transfer date recorded by HM Land Registry; registrations can appear after a delay and historical records may be corrected or removed in later releases.
• EPCs can be old, replaced or incomplete. Their floor area is a recorded certificate value, not a fresh measurement commissioned by this site.
• Rent, earnings and yield indicators are local-authority-level context. An indicative gross yield is an area-level comparison of local rent and district sale prices, before costs, tax, vacancies or financing; it is not investment advice.
• Energy ratings, tenure, housing stock, housing delivery and flood context are area-level evidence only where a suitable official source covers that geography. Flood figures use postcode-centroid screening and are not an assessment of flood risk for an individual property.
• Postcode districts are broad areas. They can include different housing types and neighbourhoods, so an area statistic cannot value a particular street or property.

We do not publish house numbers, sub-building names, individual sale records or individual EPC records. Address fields are used internally only to link source records, and published outputs are aggregate geography statistics. The same boundary applies to downloads and the Professional API: neither provides raw Price Paid Data, EPC records, addresses or individual-property results.

Source updates are processed on a schedule and each page states the latest transaction date represented in its loaded data. Figures can change when HM Land Registry revises Price Paid Data or when a source refresh improves coverage. We retain source versions and recalculate derived figures rather than treating previous results as fixed.