How to Find Out How Much a House Sold For in the UK: Every Free Method, Step by Step

To find out how much a house sold for in the UK, search the address for free at gov.uk/search-house-prices, which queries HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data — more than 24 million records covering every registered sale in England and Wales since January 1995, according to HM Land Registry. Alternatively, use the sold-prices sections on Rightmove or Zoopla, which republish the same official data with old listing photos and floorplans attached.

Whichever route you take, it costs nothing — nobody should ever pay just to see a sold price. The part most guides skip: prices take three to six months to appear after completion, some sales never appear at all, and a handful of the prices that do appear are actively misleading as comparables. This guide walks through each method step by step, then shows you how to interpret what you find.

The quick answer: three free ways to check any sold price

Method 1: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (the official record)

Every property sold for value in England and Wales must be lodged for registration with HM Land Registry, and the price paid becomes public record. The Price Paid Data (PPD) is the source every portal repackages. It holds more than 24 million records stretching back to January 1995, and OnTheMarket's Land Registry data table puts England alone at roughly 24.27 million registered sales with an all-time average price of £202,905 (as of 26 May 2026).

The GOV.UK search page hands you a postcode box and nothing else — no guidance on what the results mean. The full search tool at landregistry.data.gov.uk/app/ppd is far more powerful, so that's the one worth learning.

Step-by-step: searching the Price Paid Data

1. Open the Price Paid Data search, or start at gov.uk/search-house-prices and click Start now.
2. Enter the postcode, street name or town. A postcode gives the tightest results; a street name catches sales where the postcode was recorded differently.
3. Set the date range. Leave it wide (1995 to today) on your first pass — a property's full sale history is far more useful than its latest price alone.
4. Run the search. Each result shows the price paid, the date of transfer (that's the completion date, not the registration date), the address, the property type (detached, semi-detached, terraced or flat) and the tenure (freehold or leasehold).
5. Click any address to see every recorded sale of that property since 1995 — an instant price history.

Search the whole street, not just one house. If number 42 sold for £310,000 in 2024 and three near-identical neighbours sold between £295,000 and £305,000 the same year, you've built a rough street valuation in two minutes — and you're already most of the way to spotting the street's ceiling price.

The filters everyone ignores (and the CSV download)

The official tool has filters that no portal exposes and almost nobody uses:

• Property type — compare flats with flats, not with the detached house on the corner.
• New build — separate first sales of new homes from resales (essential, for reasons covered below).
• Tenure — freehold and leasehold prices for otherwise similar homes can differ sharply, especially flats with short leases.
• Transaction category — Standard (Category A) versus Additional (Category B) entries. Category B includes repossessions and other sales you shouldn't use as comparables.
• Price and date range — strip out ancient sales and obvious outliers before you compare anything.
• CSV download — export every result for a postcode district and sort it in a spreadsheet.

Method 2: Rightmove and Zoopla (same data, more context)

Rightmove and Zoopla don't generate sold prices — both republish HM Land Registry records for England and Wales and Registers of Scotland records for Scotland, so their figures match the official register exactly. Zoopla layers in survey records, Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey data and updates monthly. Rightmove's own FAQ confirms that HM Land Registry publishes its sold-price update on the 20th of each month, with Rightmove syncing within a few weeks after that.

Their killer feature is context. If the property was marketed on the portal, the sold-price page usually links the archived listing — photos, floorplan and the asking price at the time. Seeing that a house sold £20,000 under asking, with photos showing a 1990s kitchen, tells you things the raw number never can. OnTheMarket, Nethouseprices and Mouseprice offer similar free lookups from the same underlying register; they're fine as cross-checks, but you won't find different numbers, because there is only one register.

Why the sale isn't showing yet: the 3–6 month lag explained

The single most common frustration: a house completed months ago and there's still no price anywhere. That's normal, and the pipeline explains why:

1. The sale completes and the keys change hands.
2. The buyer's solicitor lodges the registration application with HM Land Registry — this alone can take weeks.
3. HM Land Registry processes the registration. Backlogs at this stage are the main source of delay.
4. The sale enters the next monthly Price Paid Data release, published on the 20th of the month.
5. Rightmove, Zoopla and the other portals sync the new data a few weeks later.

In practice, around three months from completion to publication is common and six months is not unusual, as conveyancing guides such as SmoothSale document — Rightmove's FAQ says only that it takes 'weeks to months'. And the pipeline is always full: HMRC counted around 100,000 UK residential transactions in December 2025 alone, up 4.7% year on year.

How to find a sold price before it registers

• Check the archived listing on Rightmove or Zoopla — the last advertised price is usually close to (though rarely identical to) the final figure.
• Ask the selling agent. Once contracts have exchanged, many agents will share the agreed price, particularly with serious local buyers or sellers.
• Ask the buyer or seller directly if you know them — the price becomes public within months anyway.
• If it sold at auction, the result is usually published on the auction house's website within days of the hammer falling.

The blind spots: sales you'll never see (or shouldn't trust)

The register is definitive, but it isn't complete — and a few of the prices it does show will mislead you if you take them at face value. None of the big portals explain this; the rules live in GOV.UK's About the Price Paid Data guidance.

Category A vs Category B transactions

Every PPD entry carries a transaction category. According to GOV.UK, Category A is a standard price paid entry: a single residential property sold for value. Category B — additional price paid entries — covers transfers under a power of sale (repossessions), buy-to-lets where they're identifiable by the mortgage, transfers to non-private individuals such as companies, and sales where the property type is classed as Other.

Sales that never appear at all

GOV.UK's About the Price Paid Data page lists the transactions excluded from the dataset entirely:

• Right-to-buy sales at a discount
• Transfers for no money — gifts and inheritances
• Transfers following a court order, including divorce settlements and share transfers between partners
• Compulsory purchase orders
• Transfers subject to an existing mortgage
• Sales that were never lodged with HM Land Registry
• Any transaction under £100 or over £99,999,999

The practical takeaway: if a neighbour definitely 'sold' and the price never appears, the transfer was almost certainly one of these. The data isn't broken — the transaction just isn't in scope.

New-build quirks

New-build prices come with three caveats no top-ranking guide mentions. First, developer incentives — deposit contributions, upgraded kitchens, paid stamp duty — are often baked into the recorded price, so new-build pounds-per-square-metre figures run hot compared with resales. Second, first registrations of new homes can take longer to appear than resales, stretching the lag further. Third, the fix is already built into the official tool: switch on the new-build filter to separate first sales from the resale market before you compare anything.

What about Scotland and Northern Ireland?

HM Land Registry covers England and Wales only. In Scotland, sold prices are held by Registers of Scotland and searchable through ScotLIS; the same data also feeds the Rightmove and Zoopla sold-price sections for Scottish addresses, so the portal route works there too.

Northern Ireland is the genuine gap. There is no free public register of individual sold prices: Land and Property Services holds the records, and the Northern Ireland House Price Index tracks trends, but for a specific address you'll need to ask local agents. Rightmove confirms it carries no Northern Ireland sold-price data at all.

Found the price — now read it properly

A sold price on its own answers 'what', not 'what now'. Three adjustments turn a raw figure into something you can act on.

Adjust old prices with the UK House Price Index

A 2019 sold price is stale evidence. Look up the property's local authority on the official UK House Price Index, find the percentage change between the sale month and the latest data, and apply it. If a house sold for £250,000 and the local index has risen 15% since, the indexed value is roughly £287,500 today — a starting point rather than a valuation, but far better than quoting the raw 2019 figure.

Keep the asking-versus-sold distinction front of mind while you do it. In May 2026 the average UK asking price was £378,304 according to Rightmove's House Price Index, while Zoopla's sold-price-based average was £271,500, up 1.3% year on year — and Zoopla's regional averages run from £149,400 in the North East to £526,400 in London. Asking prices are marketing; sold prices are evidence.

Compare like-for-like with £ per square metre

A £310,000 four-bed and a £310,000 two-bed on the same street are not the same price. Pair each sold price with the property's floor area from its public EPC record — every EPC certificate lists the total floor area in square metres — and divide. A £252,000 sale of an 84 m² terrace works out at £3,000 per square metre; if a 120 m² house up the road sold at the same rate, it would fetch £360,000. No portal calculates this for you, and it's the single fairest way to compare homes of different sizes.

The context behind the number

A house that sold £30,000 under its street average usually sold cheap for a reason — and the reason is often sitting in another public dataset. Cross-check the address against the Environment Agency flood map, police.uk crime levels, planning applications on neighbouring plots and Coal Authority and BGS subsidence records. Each check is free individually; HouseDossier pulls all 15+ datasets into a single sold-price and risk report if you'd rather skip the dozen browser tabs.

One more number worth knowing before you act on any sold price: the local ceiling — the highest price ever paid on or near the street. If the most anyone has paid within a quarter of a mile is £335,000, an asking price of £375,000 needs an extraordinary justification. We cover how to find and use it in our guide to ceiling prices.

Worked example: tracing one house's full price story

Here's the whole method applied to one illustrative terrace — call it 12 Alma Street:

1. Pull the history. The Price Paid Data search shows three Category A sales: £58,000 in 1999, £174,950 in 2012 and £252,000 in 2021 — all freehold, terraced, not new build. Twenty-six years of price history from one search.
2. Find the archived listing. Zoopla's sold-price page links the 2021 listing: asking price £260,000, so it went about 3% under asking, and the photos show a refitted kitchen.
3. Get the floor area. The property's EPC records 84 m², making the 2021 sale £3,000 per square metre. Two larger neighbours sold the same year at £2,850–£2,950 per m² — number 12 achieved a modest premium, consistent with that kitchen.
4. Index it forward. The UK House Price Index for the local authority shows prices up around 9% since mid-2021, indexing the £252,000 to roughly £275,000 today.
5. Check the context. No flood zone, no mining legacy, no live planning applications next door — nothing was suppressing the price, so it's a clean, usable comparable.

Total cost: nothing. Total time: about twenty minutes by hand, or a couple of minutes if a report gathers it for you. Either way, you now know more about that house's value than most buyers ever learn — and you haven't even started on the other checks worth running before an offer.

Frequently asked questions