The most expensive postcodes in England & Wales, per square metre

Lists of “the most expensive places to buy” usually rank headline prices, and headline prices mostly measure how big the homes are. Rank the same sales per square metre (the price actually paid, divided by the floor area actually measured) and the question changes from where are the biggest houses to where is a metre of Britain worth most. The figures below are computed that way: every registered sale in England & Wales matched to the floor area on its Energy Performance Certificate, with the median taken per postcode district. They update monthly; the current build covers sales to August 2026.

The gap is the story. A square metre of SW3 currently costs £15,600 at the median; a square metre of DL4 costs £980. That is 16 times the price, between two postcode districts in the same housing market, under the same laws, on the same land register. The same pound buys 16 times more home depending on where it is spent.

Which districts are dearest per square metre?

Every district here had at least 100 matched sales in the last twelve months, so none of these medians rests on a handful of trophy transactions:

1. 1. SW3 Chelsea, London – £15,600/m² (180 matched sales)
2. 2. SW7 Kensington, London – £15,000/m² (136 matched sales)
3. 3. W8 Kensington, London – £15,000/m² (148 matched sales)
4. 4. W11 Notting Hill, London – £14,400/m² (155 matched sales)
5. 5. SW10 London – £12,500/m² (124 matched sales)

The full table, the 50 most expensive postcode districts in England & Wales , carries each district’s matched-sale count and a ten-year price shape, and there is a version for every region.

Which are the cheapest?

The other end of the table is not a list of places nobody buys: the qualifying rule is the same 100 matched sales, so these are active markets where a metre simply costs less:

1. 1. DL4 Old Eldon, Shildon – £980/m² (123 matched sales)
2. 2. SR8 Horden, Peterlee – £1,080/m² (327 matched sales)
3. 3. FY1 Blackpool – £1,160/m² (287 matched sales)
4. 4. TS3 North Ormesby, Middlesbrough – £1,200/m² (132 matched sales)
5. 5. DN32 Old Clee, Grimsby – £1,200/m² (276 matched sales)

The full list is the 50 best-value postcode districts.

How are these rankings built?

The sale price comes from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, which records every registered sale in England & Wales. The floor area comes from the property’s Energy Performance Certificate. The two are matched on address, each sale becomes a price per square metre, and the published figure is the median over the district’s matched sales, with the count printed beside it, because that count is the median’s own denominator. EPC floor areas are approximate for any single home (they exclude garages and are recorded to the whole square metre), but across a hundred or more sales those errors largely cancel. The methodology page documents every rule, including the ones that limit us.

Can you reuse these figures?

Everything here is open data and stays open: reuse it, including commercially, under the Open Government Licence v3.0, with the attribution line below. The free dataset page has the full per-district CSV and JSON, and each linked table above updates automatically with every monthly rebuild: a bookmark, not a snapshot. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.