Private rental prices development plan, UK: updated July 2025

• Our Private rental prices development plan, UK: updated April 2025 article outlined our intentions for addressing the Office for Statistics Regulation's (OSR's) requirements from their Spotlight on Quality Assessment: Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) report. 

• This article provides an update on additional progress made since April 2025, and we intend to update this release quarterly during 2025. 

• We are seeking feedback on how you use Price Index of Private Rent (PIPR) statistics, how well they meet your needs and how we could better explain PIPR methods; our PIPR user engagement survey is open from 18 June to 10 September 2025.

This section provides an update on progress made since our Private rental prices development plan, UK: updated April 2025 article and should be accompanied by the full information in Section 3: Publish more information on data collection and quality monitoring (requirement 1) of that article. 

Meeting expected monthly volumes 

We are engaging with the data providers, aiming to obtain permission to publish data collection volumes by month, by property type and by geography. We plan to publish analysis by October 2025.

Quality and representativeness of the Price Index of Private Rent (PIPR) statistics 

We are engaging with the devolved administrations, seeking permission to publish more detail on our data suppliers' monthly rents data collection volumes and PIPR's monthly dataset. This aims to support users' understanding of the quality and representativeness of the monthly dataset used by PIPR's regression model to produce PIPR price estimates, which, after combining with PIPR's annual weights, are representative of the rental stock.

This section provides an update on progress made since our Private rental prices development plan, UK: updated April 2025 article and should be accompanied by the full information in Section 5: Publish a summary of user feedback and plans for future user engagement (requirement 3) of that article. 

User feedback summary 

We have updated the previous response to the user request for additional breakdowns as follows.  

Users requested: 

• estimates at additional breakdowns; for example, counties, UK excluding London, new versus existing tenancies 

Response: 

• we are expanding Price Index of Private Rent's (PIPR's) system capability to produce additional aggregation levels (such as counties and UK excluding London) 

• we cannot produce a PIPR breakdown by "new" and "existing" tenancies because available rents data do not include this distinction, as explained in the "Coherence" subsection of Section 5: Quality characteristics of the PIPR data in the Price Index of Private Rents QMI and in our How we measure rental price inflation blog 

We have updated the previous response to the user request for increased methodology clarification as follows.  

Users requested: 

• that the methodology needs to be clearer to understand; there are too many acronyms and complicated words 

• more details on the application of the methodology, including a worked example 

• further information on PIPR weighting and the methodology used 

• further clarification regarding chain-linking and its use to link Index of Private Housing Rental Prices (IPHRP) to PIPR 

Response: 

• the Price Index of Private Rents QMI was updated in March 2025, including details on data sources and methods used to calculate PIPR weights and additional details to support users' understanding of PIPR methods 

• our How we measure rental price inflation blog explains how rental prices are used in PIPR, with a worked example 

• in May 2025, we held a public webinar for users in which we provided an explanation of PIPR methods, strengths and limitations, aimed for non-technical user understanding; users can view the Understanding house and rent price statistics webinar 

• we will provide further accessible explanations of PIPR methods later in 2025, such as an online video explainer 

• the "Aggregation of elementary aggregates" subsection of Section 6: Methods used to produce the PIPR data in our Price Index of Private Rents QMI explains the standard chain-linking approach used by ONS in price inflation statistics 

• the "Creation of a historical series" subsection of Section 6: Methods used to produce the PIPR data in our Price Index of Private Rents QMI explains how IPHRP was chain-linked to PIPR to produce the longest time series possible 

User engagement strategy 

We continue to take a proactive approach in strengthening engagement with users of our data.  

On 28 May 2025, we facilitated an interactive webinar for non-technical users of our data: Bricks, mortar and data: understanding house and rent prices, which was recorded. This was part of our Bringing data to life collection. The webinar, which featured a guest speaker representative from one of PIPR's rents data suppliers, included a question and answer session for users to seek clarity on their understanding. We thank users who attended and engaged with the session, for which we received positive feedback.  

On 18 June 2025, we launched the Price Index of Private Rents user engagement survey. From 18 June to 10 September 2025, we invite all users to provide feedback on how you use PIPR statistics, how well they meet your needs and where we could improve explanations of PIPR methods.

We are investigating options to make better use of the Statistics User Network (SUN) to engage with our users on a more frequent basis. We have already used the SUN to promote the PIPR user engagement survey, and will continue to use this channel to provide updates.

Further planned improvements to the Price Index of Private Rents 

Feedback received from users and stakeholders is summarised in Section 5: Publish a summary of user feedback and plans for future user engagement (requirement 3) of our updated April 2025 article. Further updates to some of our responses have been provided in Section 3: Publish a summary of user feedback and plans for future user engagement (requirement 3) of this article.  

In some cases, we have already taken action to meet these user requests, and some requests may be met during planned future work. In this release, the "response" provided has been updated with the latest developments to keep users informed of the outcome of their request. 

Plans for evaluating the "in development" status of the Price Index of Private Rents 

In Section 5: Publish a summary of user feedback and plans for future user engagement (requirement 3) of our updated April 2025 article, we set out our engagement plan for the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR). Objective 3 specifically focuses on how we will evaluate PIPR's "in development" status, though all aspects of the engagement plan are aimed at addressing the requirements set out in the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) report. 

This development plan will be used to provide updates on our engagement plan, how we will respond to user feedback and other updates. We will also explore other forms of communication to provide users with more accessible updates.

Future timeline dates are estimates and subject to change. Project milestones for 2025 include: 

• publishing our response to the Office for Statistics Regulation's (OSR's) recommendations, January 2025: complete 

• publishing impact analysis for Northern Ireland transformation, January 2025: complete 

• publishing a decision on incorporation into official statistics, early 2025: complete 

• publishing a bulletin with Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) covering all of the UK, March 2025: complete 

• regular publishing of progress updates addressing the OSR's requirements, 2025: ongoing 

• user engagement following the launch of PIPR UK, 2025: detailed in Section 5: Publish a summary of user feedback and plans for future user engagement (requirement 3)

• publishing of our next progress update: October 2025