England & Wales price per square metre in 2026: what the sold-price data shows

The median home sold in England & Wales over the last twelve months went for £291,000. Per square metre, the median is £3,380. The second number is the more useful one, because it does not move when the mix of what sold changes: 479,016 sales across 2,285 postcode districts, each divided by the floor area on that property’s Energy Performance Certificate. The figures update monthly; the current build covers sales to July 2026. This describes what the sold-price data says. It is not a forecast.

What is the price per square metre by region?

The last column is the one worth staring at: how many square metres of local housing a single year of local median full-time earnings would buy, before any deposit, mortgage or tax. It puts prices and wages in one figure, and it is why a cheap home in the North East is not simply “cheap”.

The dearest region in the table runs at 3.3 times the cheapest on price per square metre, and nowhere near that on earnings. Affordability lives in the difference: a year’s median pay buys far more housing in the North East than in London, not because the North East pays well but because London’s wage premium is a fraction of its price premium.

What does the ten-year picture show?

Everything in the rest of this article is live, the changes included: it all comes from the current build, covering sales to July 2026, and every price and sales count is the one the district’s own page carries. The method is to take each district’s median £/m², average the three quarters starting Q2 2016 and the three ending Q1 2026, then take the change between them. That window ends where it does because the data says so rather than because a date was typed here: registrations lag sales, so the most recent quarters are still filling up and are left out. The regional figure is the median of that change across the districts in the region, and the bracket is how many districts stand behind it:

• Wales, up 52.7% (145 districts)
• North West, up 50.9% (243 districts)
• West Midlands, up 46.5% (209 districts)
• Yorkshire and The Humber, up 45.1% (203 districts)
• East Midlands, up 43.7% (136 districts)
• South West, up 36.0% (258 districts)
• North East, up 36.5% (108 districts)
• East of England, up 27.6% (236 districts)
• South East, up 23.0% (364 districts)
• London, up 11.7% (217 districts)

Across all 2,119 districts with a full decade of matched sales the median rise is 35.5%. Set that list beside the price table above and it reads close to an inversion of it: the cheaper the region per square metre a decade ago, the more it has risen since. Convergence, not divergence.

Where did prices rise most?

The fastest risers cluster around Manchester and Liverpool, starting from very low bases, though not exclusively: a Welsh district sits inside this group too. Nine districts sat at the top of that ranking when this article was written, and both which nine and the order they appear in are the editorial part, fixed at that build. The change and the median beside each of them are not: both come from the current build, so a district may now have moved above or below its neighbour here. Read the list as the nine that led a decade of growth, not as today’s order of merit; the rankings are rebuilt with the data and are the place to see which districts lead now.

• OL8, Hollinwood in Oldham: up 106.0% (£2,350/m²)
• M18, Abbey Hey in Manchester: up 113.1% (£2,540/m²)
• L24, Speke in Liverpool: up 117.1% (£2,130/m²)
• L27, Netherley in Liverpool: up 122.7% (£1,800/m²)
• M9, Harpurhey in Manchester: up 108.6% (£2,520/m²)
• L11, Norris Green in Liverpool: up 83.2% (£1,980/m²)
• L4, Walton in Liverpool: up 112.4% (£1,620/m²)
• CF43, Tylorstown in the Rhondda: up 72.3% (£1,300/m²)
• OL7, Ashton-under-Lyne: up 96.7% (£2,660/m²)

A doubling from £800/m² to £1,600/m² is not the same event as a doubling from £8,000. In absolute terms these are still among the cheapest districts in the country. But it is where a decade of price growth actually landed.

Where did they go the other way?

Of the 1,300 districts with a confidence rating of High and at least 150 sales in the last twelve months, only 18 fell over the decade, and the fall is overwhelmingly a London story. Seven of them were named here when this article was written, and each change below is from the current build: W14, Holland Park down 3.9%, NW1, Marylebone down 10.8%, TW8, Brentford down 7.4%, E14, Isle of Dogs down 7.4%, SE1, Borough down 8.2% and E1, Aldgate down 2.0%. The only one of the seven outside the capital is RG1, Reading, down 1.9%.

Where is the cheap end of each region?

One district per region, picked when the list above was and on a different test: the lowest median £/m² in its region among districts with at least 150 registered sales, so that a handful of transactions cannot set the mark. The selection is fixed. The figures are not: each rate below is the district’s median today and the bracketed number is the matched sales behind it, so where a district has moved since, you see where it moved to:

• North East: SR8, Horden near Peterlee, £1,080/m² (330 sales)
• North West: FY1, Blackpool, £1,170/m² (290 sales)
• Yorkshire and The Humber: DN32, Old Clee in Grimsby, £1,200/m² (260 sales)
• Wales: CF45, Abercynon, £1,600/m² (135 sales)
• West Midlands: ST6, in Stoke-on-Trent, £1,860/m² (542 sales)
• East Midlands: S80, Creswell near Worksop, £2,010/m² (266 sales)
• East of England: NR30, Caister-on-Sea, £1,920/m² (203 sales)
• South West: PL4, Mutley in Plymouth, £2,160/m² (343 sales)
• South East: CT17, River in Dover, £2,730/m² (214 sales)
• London: DA8, Northumberland Heath, £4,430/m² (227 sales)

Set that list against SW3, Chelsea, which runs at £15,500/m² across 175 matched sales. The distance between the cheapest line in that list and this one is the real shape of the England & Wales housing market. No national average price will show it to you.

What can this measure not do?

Price per square metre removes the size of the home from the comparison, which is most of the noise. It does not remove everything. A district median still partly reflects the mix of what sold in the period, so a quarter with more large houses reads higher; these figures are not mix-adjusted, unlike the official UK House Price Index. Floor areas come from EPC assessments. Those do not exist for every sale and occasionally contain errors, so £/m² statistics rest on the matched subset of resales while median prices cover the wider sale record. The most recent quarters are always incomplete because registrations lag sales by 2–8 weeks, and they are excluded from every growth figure above, which is why the window that section names ends where it does. And none of it is a statement about any individual property.