HM Land Registry’s Price Paid Data is one of the most useful open datasets in the UK: the price and date of residential property sales in England and Wales, going back to 1995. It powers valuation tools, lending checks, property portals and market research. It is also easy to misread. This guide covers the details that most often trip up software built on it.
What it covers
Price Paid Data records residential sales for value in England and Wales that have been lodged with HM Land Registry for registration. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate land registers and are not included. Standard sales are available from January 1995. The data is published under the Open Government Licence, which allows commercial use.
Recent months are always incomplete
HM Land Registry publishes an update at 11am on the 20th working day of each month. A sale only appears once it has been lodged for registration, which typically takes between two weeks and two months, and sometimes longer. As a result, the two most recent months are incomplete. If your product shows recent activity, say so: “no sales recorded in the last two months” is not the same as “no sales”.
Not every transaction is included
Sales that were not for value are excluded, along with transfers such as gifts, right-to-buy sales at a discount, transfers on divorce and compulsory purchases, and sales not yet lodged for registration. GOV.UK publishes the full list. Price Paid Data is therefore a record of qualifying sales, not of every change of ownership, and it should be described that way to your users.
Category A and category B
Each record has a category. Category A is the standard entry: a single residential property sold for value. Category B covers additional price paid entries, including repossessions, buy-to-let purchases where they can be identified by a mortgage, transfers to companies and other non-private individuals, and properties classed as “other”. Category B records are available from October 2013, and the dataset does not say which kind of category B transaction each one is. For averages and comparisons, most analysis uses category A only; mixing the two can skew results, especially in areas with many repossessions or company purchases.
Monthly changes: additions, changes and deletions
If you load the monthly change file rather than the full dataset, each record has a status: A for an addition, C for a change and D for a deletion. Apply all three. If a record was put in the wrong category, it is deleted from the original category and added to the correct one under a new transaction identifier, so a system that ignores deletions will slowly double-count sales. Use the transaction identifier as your key.
Reading the fields
Property type is a single letter (detached, semi-detached, terraced, flat or maisonette, and other), with separate flags for new builds and for freehold or leasehold tenure. Addresses are split into a primary addressable object, such as a house number or building name, a secondary one, such as a flat number, then street, locality, town and postcode. Matching these against your own address data needs normalisation: the same flat can appear as “Flat 2” in one source and “2” in another.
Licence, attribution and personal data
The Open Government Licence requires attribution wherever you use or publish the data, for example: “Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.” HM Land Registry notes that the licence does not cover third-party rights it cannot license. And although the data is public, an address linked to a sale price and date can relate to an identifiable person, so think about data protection before combining it with other information about individuals.
How GovBridge handles it
GovBridge offers postcode lookups of Price Paid Data through HM Land Registry’s public linked data service, returned in the same consistent JSON format as its other sources. Because the data changes monthly, GovBridge caches each postcode’s results for seven days. A property sale history lookup costs 150 credits, and the developer preview includes 500 free credits at www.govbridge.co.uk. For help building property data into your own product, email hello@yugsolutions.co.uk.