Median or average: which house price should you believe?

“The average house price” is two different numbers wearing one name, and the gap between them is not pedantry. It decides what you believe a market costs. When a headline says average, it usually means the mean: add every price, divide by the count. When this site says median, it means the middle sale: half of sales came in above it, half below. In a big, calm market the two sit close together. In a postcode district, they routinely do not.

Why the mean drifts

The mean uses every pound of every sale, which means one exceptional transaction moves it. A district that trades forty homes a year around £250,000, plus one converted rectory at £2 million, gets a mean about £43,000 above what the typical buyer paid. Nobody bought at the mean. The median barely notices the rectory: the middle sale is still the middle sale. That resistance to extremes is the whole argument, and it matters most exactly where samples are small, which is what a postcode district is.

The same district, both numbers

The gap is visible in the live data. In SW11, Battersea, the 12 months to June 2026 show a median sold price of £740,000, while the mean across the same sales runs meaningfully higher, dragged by a tail of multi-million pound houses between the commons. Neither number is false. The median says what the middle buyer paid; the mean says what the market turned over per sale. If you are deciding whether an asking price is reasonable, you want the first. If you are a treasurer summing stamp duty receipts, you want the second.

Per square metre, the choice matters twice

Price per square metre is a ratio, so extremes get in through either the price or the floor area, a mismeasured EPC can make one sale look absurdly cheap per metre. RealScout therefore publishes the median price per square metre as the headline everywhere, shows the mean beside it where the sample is robust, and fences out physically implausible ratios before either is computed (the sales stay in the counts and the lists; only the broken ratio is excluded). The methodology page states every rule.

When the two disagree, that is information

A mean sitting well above the median tells you the market has a expensive tail: a few big houses in a district of flats, as in most of inner London. A mean below the median is rarer and usually means a tail of distressed or unusual cheap sales. Either way, the gap is a description of the market’s shape, which is why each district page also shows the middle 60% band (p20–p80) rather than pretending one number can carry a whole distribution. In L1, central Liverpool, that band ran £1,900 to £3,720/m² over the 12 months to June 2026, nearly a factor of two inside one district, and no single “average” would have told you that.

Every term above is defined in the glossary, and every figure comes from the June 2026 dataset of HM Land Registry sold prices matched to EPC floor areas.