← Blog · 20 September 2026 · By Aadityaa Mehrotra

Flat prices against house prices: the widest gap on the 31-year record

In 2005, 39 of the 102 postcode areas of England and Wales priced their typical flat at or above their typical terraced house. In 2025 none did. In the typical district a flat now brings 64p for every £1 of the terraced price, the lowest figure on the record.

Every sale in the Land Registry record carries a property type: detached, semi-detached, terraced or a flat. Hold the median flat sale against the median terraced sale in the same place, year after year, and the two types tell one consistent story: flats have been losing ground against houses for two decades, and the gap is now the widest the record has measured.

No postcode area still prices flats above terraced houses

In 2005, 39 of the 102 postcode areas with enough sales of both types to measure had their median flat at or above their median terraced house. They were the urban north and the Midlands in the main: Manchester (M), Liverpool (L), Leeds (LS), Sheffield (S) and Birmingham (B) were all on the list. By 2015 the list was down to 14. In 2025 it is empty.

The last area on it was Blackburn (BB) in 2024, and the margin was £200: a median flat at £110,200 against a median terraced house at £110,000.

one postcode area with flats at or above terraced houses that year

The big cities flipped one by one

City flats spent the early 2000s above city houses. In 2002, the median flat sold across the Manchester postcode area cost 2.44 times as much as the median terraced house (£100,000 against £41,000). 11 of the 13 big-city areas below priced flats at or above terraced houses at some point in the record; Newcastle and London never did. One by one they went below, some hovering at the line for years first. Bristol went first and has stayed below since 2004; Manchester held longest, with flats still at or above terraced houses in 2022. The table under the chart carries each area's last year at or above the line.

flats at or above terraced housesflats below, deeper red the further below

London is its own case. Its flats sold below its terraced houses in every year of the record, 78p per £1 in 1995 and 60p in 2025, because a London terraced house is a whole house on London land and prices accordingly. What changed in London is the same slide every other city shows, from a narrower gap to a wide one.

The typical district went from 82p to 64p

Hold the comparison inside a single postcode district, so both medians come from the same streets, and take the middle district of every one with ten or more sales of each type. In 2006 that typical district's flat brought 82p for every £1 of its terraced price. The figure has fallen in most years since, and in 2025 it stands at 64p, the lowest in the record. This measure holds geography still, so what it shows is the flat two streets from the terraced house losing ground to it, in almost every part of the country at once.

Inflation gives the slide a size in money. In today's terms the national sales-weighted median flat has fallen 19.9% from its 2020 peak, while the median terraced house moved -6.6% over the same years. Have house prices increased since 2020? holds every property type against inflation over the recent window; the gap here is the same one, measured over the whole record.

Why the national average still reads as parity

The national sales-weighted median flat in 2025 was £293,806 and the national median terraced house £293,823, which looks like the two types cost the same. That number is carried by where flats sell: 26% of the flats in the 2025 record sold in London, the most expensive housing in the country, so the national flat median is pulled up by London prices rather than by flats holding their value. Inside a single district, where both medians come from the same streets, the typical flat brings 64p for every £1 of the terraced price.

What the record measures here

Every figure on this page is a median of completed, registered sales: Land Registry Category A market sales, with the type recorded at registration. An area needs 30 sales of each type in a year to count, a district 10, so thin markets cannot flip a figure with a handful of completions. 1,633 districts had enough of both types to measure in 2025. Flats were 16% of all 2025 sales in the areas measured. 2026 is in the record but registrations for it are still arriving, so every chart stops at 2025, the latest full year.

The register carries prices, dates, addresses and types. It does not carry tenure terms, service charges, ground rents or cladding status, so it can say what happened to flat prices and when, and cannot by itself say why. What it does show is when the slide steepened: the parity count in the first chart fell from 11 areas in 2020 to 2 in 2021 and has not recovered. Those are years when leasehold costs were widely reported, and the record is consistent with that without proving it.

Two companion pieces use the same data: City centres left behind follows what a flat-heavy district does to a city-centre price, and Have house prices increased since 2020? holds all types together against inflation over the recent past. Every district's own flat and house medians are on its local report.

Written by Aadityaa Mehrotra.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.