House price statistics for small areas in England and Wales: year ending March 2022

• The median price paid for residential properties in Lower-layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in England ranged from £25,000 (within Sunderland) to £5.8 million (within Westminster) in the year ending March 2022.

• The median price paid for residential properties in LSOAs in Wales ranged from £61,000 (within Denbighshire) to £655,000 (within Vale of Glamorgan) in the year ending March 2022.

There are 49 house price statistics for small areas (HPSSA) datasets in total, which show house prices by property type for various geographies in England and Wales, as well as the number of property transactions. Linked here are the most frequently downloaded datasets.

Lower-layer Super Output Area (LSOA)

A Lower-layer Super Output Area (LSOA) is a geographical hierarchy designed to improve the reporting of small area statistics in England and Wales. There are 34,759 LSOAs in England and Wales, each containing between 400 and 1,200 households. More information can be found by visiting our Census geography page.

Data collection

The house price statistics for small areas (HPSSAs) use data from HM Land Registry. This is to provide statistics on the price paid and the number of residential property transactions for properties sold in each area in England and Wales. Properties sold at a discount to the market level, such as properties sold under the Right to Buy scheme, are not included in these statistics.

HPSSAs are updated quarterly, with each adding a new 12 month period to the data. The use of rolling annual data removes seasonal effects, which refers to peaks and troughs in property transactions at particular times of the year. It also reduces the impact of registration lag, where there is a delay in registration by HM Land Registry after the completed date.

The HPSSAs are compiled using the latest available version of the published Price Paid dataset from HM Land Registry. The property registration process can take time, particularly for new build properties. Therefore, the HPSSAs may not fully reflect all transactions that have taken place in the reference period and may be subject to revision. Users should use caution when drawing conclusions from these data. Further information can be found in our House Price Index bulletin.

Differences to other house price statistics

There are two sets of official statistics for house prices. In addition to these HPSSAs, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also produces the UK House Price Index (UK HPI). The HPSSAs measure the number of property transactions and the price paid for properties sold in a given period, while the UK HPI measures the changing value of properties in the housing market. You can find out more about the differences and uses of these outputs in our House price statistics for small areas Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).

Quality

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our House price statistics for small areas QMI.

Upcoming changes

The HPSSAs provide annual statistics that are updated quarterly. We are changing some of the datasets to a single, annual publication where we provide data for the year. For example, instead of releasing datasets for years ending March, June, September and December 2021, we will only publish the year ending December 2021 to cover the whole of 2021. This change will take effect from the next publication for “year ending June 2022”. Datasets will be published either annually or quarterly as contained in Table 1: HPSSA dataset publication periodicity. If you have any feedback about this change, please contact hpi@ons.gov.uk.