Are UK house prices falling? What the sold-price record actually shows
Searches for “UK average house price decline” have jumped enough to register as a breakout trend. Here is what every recorded sale in England and Wales — not asking prices, not forecasts — actually shows.
The question arrives loaded. “Are house prices falling?” usually means my house, my street — and the honest answer from the public record is: it depends almost entirely on where you are. HomesIndex is built on HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data — every completed sale in England and Wales since 1995, geocoded to the property — so instead of a forecast, here is the record.
The national number is up 0.7%
Across every area of England and Wales, the sales-weighted typical price in 2025 — the latest complete year in the record — was £301,858, up 0.7% on 2024 (£299,734). That single number is why headlines disagree with each other: “essentially flat” is true nationally and false almost everywhere locally.
The decline is real — it lives in London
London's typical sold price peaked at £596,585 in 2022. By 2025 it stood at £567,750 — 4.8% below that peak, and the slide shows no sign of levelling in the partial 2026 figures. Meanwhile the big northern cities have moved the other way: a typical 2025 sale across Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle was £205,755, higher than a year before.
Line up the areas that moved most between 2024 and 2025 and the geography is unmistakable — the fallers are London and its commuter belt; the risers are the North and Wales:
The quieter story: how few homes are selling
Prices get the headlines; volumes tell you about the market's health. 905,313 sales were recorded in 2025 — 29% below 2021's 1,277,171. A thin market makes every price statistic noisier, and it is one reason the same street can produce a “crash” headline and a “recovery” headline in the same quarter.
Check your own postcode, not the average
The map below is the same data with nothing averaged away: every postcode area shaded by its median sold price, and every recorded sale underneath as you zoom in. The honest answer to “are prices falling?” is one search away.
Open the full average prices map · or read your area's standing market report
A note on the data
Figures are medians of completed sales recorded by HM Land Registry (Crown copyright), not asking prices or valuations. “Typical price” across a region is the sales-weighted average of each postcode area's median. The Land Registry registers sales weeks or months after completion, so the most recent year (2026) is always partial and excluded from the charts above; it currently shows the same pattern — London down, the North holding.