← Blog · 2 August 2026 · By Aadityaa Mehrotra

House prices per square metre: the cheapest and most expensive places in England & Wales

A square metre of home costs £940 in Middlesbrough (TS1) and £20,870 in London (SW1X). Across 2,049 districts, 91% of the variation in price comes from that rate and only 9% from how big the homes are.

Victorian terraced houses on Victoria Street, Norwich — Photo: Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A sale price is two quantities multiplied together: how much floor space changed hands, and what that space costs where it sits. Divide the price by the floor area and you get a rate per square metre, which is comparable between places in a way a price is not.

The rate runs from £940 to £20,870

Every district on one axis. The median district charges £3,340 a square metre and most of the country sits in a narrow band around it, with a long right tail running well past the rest.

Most of the country is packed into the cheap end · cost of one square metre of home, 2,049 postcode districts in England and Wales, each a single tick

one tick per district, cheapest on the left

London (SW1X) at £20,870 is 22 times Middlesbrough (TS1) at £940. The distribution is right-skewed: the median district charges £3,340 and the mean £3,786, pulled up by the tail.

What £314,243 actually buys, drawn to scale

Converting the rate back into floor space makes the spread concrete. Take the national median price of £314,243, spend it at each district's own rate, and draw the result to scale.

What £314,243, the national middle price, buys · floor area at each district's own rate, drawn to relative scale

the AREA of each square is in proportion, not its width

The same sum buys 334 m² in Middlesbrough (TS1) and 15 m² in London (SW1X), a factor of 22.

Almost none of the gap is about size

Expensive districts might be expensive partly because the homes in them are larger. Across the country that effect is small.

Compare the most expensive tenth of districts with the cheapest tenth. Typical prices differ by 4.7 times. Break that into its two parts and the rate accounts for 4.2 times of it, while size accounts for 1.15 times. Homes in the most expensive tenth are only about 15% bigger than homes in the cheapest tenth.

Decomposing the variance of log price across all 2,049 districts gives the same answer. 91% of the variation comes from the rate and 9% from floor area. The correlation between a district's rate and its typical home size is 0.00, so the two are effectively independent.

The most expensive districts are not the ones with the biggest homes · if they were, every line would run flat across; ten districts spread evenly across the rate range

each line is one district in both rankingsa line that slopes means the two rankings disagree3 of the 10 hold the same place in both

The left column ranks ten districts by rate, highest at the top; the right column ranks the same ten by typical home size. Under a positive correlation the lines would run flat. They cross instead.

Two limits on the figures

Each rate is a median across a whole district, and districts contain streets that differ widely, so the within-district spread is far larger than these numbers show.

Floor area comes from energy performance assessments, which cover most sales but not all. A district with few recent assessments produces a noisier rate than one with many.

Written by Aadityaa Mehrotra.