Have house prices increased since 2020?
Sale prices are up 14.3% since 2020. Consumer prices are up 26.7% over the same five years, so the typical home is worth 9.8% less than it was in real terms.
In pounds, a typical home in England and Wales sold for £274,969 in 2020 and £314,243 in 2025. Put both figures into today's money and that 2020 sale is worth £357k, against £322k now.
Where the gain went
The chart below splits the five years into its two parts: the extra cash a seller gets now, and what inflation took off the 2020 price over the same period.
In nominal terms the seller is £40k ahead. Deflating both years to 2025 prices with the ONS consumer price index, inflation took £75k off the 2020 figure over the same five years, so in real terms the home is £35k down.
Houses and flats did not move together
The national figure averages four property types that behaved very differently. Detached, semi-detached and terraced homes all rose between 17% and 20% in cash. Flats rose 2.5%.
| Type | Change in cash | Change in today's money | Sales in 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terraced | +19.7% | -5.5% | 217,549 |
| Semi-detached | +19.4% | -5.8% | 239,823 |
| Detached | +17.3% | -7.4% | 207,813 |
| Flats | +2.5% | -19.1% | 129,157 |
Flats are the outlier by a wide margin: up just 2.5% in cash, which works out at 19% down in today's money. Anyone who bought a flat in 2020 and sold it this year has, on average, handed over five years of inflation and got very little back for it.
Nearly everywhere rose, and nearly everywhere lost
Now do it area by area. In cash, 100 of 104 postcode areas are higher than they were in 2020. In today's money, only 11 are.
The areas that are genuinely ahead are the cheap ones. Oldham (OL), Llandrindod Wells (LD), Bolton (BL) lead the list, and all three were among the least expensive places in the country to begin with. At the other end, WC and EC in central London have lost more than a third of their value in five years.
So the gap between the cheapest and most expensive parts of the country narrowed over these five years. Cheap places did not boom. Expensive ones held their cash prices while inflation ran ahead of them.
What actually happened
Two things moved at once. Sale prices rose 14.3% between 2020 and 2025, while consumer prices rose 26.7%. Divide one by the other and the typical home comes out 9.8% cheaper in real terms, even though the number on every contract went up.
That national figure is an average over four property types and 104 postcode areas that moved at very different rates. By type, terraced homes lost 6% in real terms and flats lost 19%. By area, the spread ran from +11% to -44%. What you owned and where you owned it decided the outcome, not the headline rate.
Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.