Your house is worth roughly what buyers have recently paid for homes like it nearby, adjusted for the ways yours is different. That figure comes from sold prices, which are public records, free to search in England and searchable by postcode in Scotland, not from the asking prices on property portals. You can get close to it yourself in an evening with four checks, most of them free, set out below, before you pay anyone or sign with an agent.
If you would rather have that work done for you, get a free desktop valuation.
In short
- Use sold prices, not asking prices. In England they are free to search on HM Land Registry’s price paid service. In Scotland, use ScotLIS.
- Bring an older sale up to date with the official UK House Price Index for your area.
- Compare homes on price per square metre, using the floor area on each energy certificate.
- Then adjust for what a record cannot show: condition, layout, garden, parking and the street itself.
Start with sold prices, not asking prices
An asking price is what a seller hopes to get. A sold price is what a buyer actually paid, and it is the only one that tells you what the market will bear.
Rightmove’s House Price Index for September 2026, published on 21 September, puts the average asking price of homes newly listed on its site at £367,440. Rightmove says its index reflects asking prices when homes first come to market, not final sale prices. Rightmove is a property portal with a commercial interest in the market it measures.
The same release shows why the first price matters. Rightmove found that 74% of the homes sold so far in 2026 were priced right first time and needed no reduction, and that on average 61% of homes that come to market find a buyer.
For a home in England, the price paid in most residential sales is free to search by address through the government’s sold prices service. In Scotland the equivalent is Registers of Scotland’s ScotLIS service, which lets you search for property prices by postcode. For Northern Ireland, the same GOV.UK page points readers to Land and Property Services for house price information.
Two limits are worth knowing, both set out in HM Land Registry’s guidance on its price paid data:
- It lags. A sale typically takes between 2 weeks and 2 months to be registered, so the last two months are always incomplete.
- It leaves out transfers that were not sales for value. Right to Buy sales at a discount, transfers of a share on divorce, gifts and court orders are excluded. It does include some sales, such as repossessions, that may not reflect a normal open-market price, so treat any figure that looks out of line with the rest of the street with care.
Look for sales of the same type of home, on your street or the streets around it, from roughly the last year. Three to six good matches beat twenty loose ones.
Bring an older sale up to date
Sometimes the best match sold three or five years ago, or the best evidence is what you paid yourself. The official UK House Price Index, calculated by the Office for National Statistics and Land & Property Services Northern Ireland, lets you bring that figure up to date for your area.
The method is simple: divide the average price for your area now by the average price in the month of the old sale, and multiply the old price by the result. Where you live makes a large difference. Using the index’s July figures:
| Area | July 2021 | July 2026 | £200,000 in 2021 becomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| North East | £134,393 | £166,943 | about £248,000 |
| England | £250,545 | £293,479 | about £234,000 |
| Scotland | £168,799 | £196,349 | about £233,000 |
| London | £529,788 | £550,037 | about £208,000 |
Show the calculations
North East: £166,943 divided by £134,393 is 1.242, so £200,000 becomes £248,440. England: £293,479 divided by £250,545 is 1.171, so £200,000 becomes £234,272. Scotland: £196,349 divided by £168,799 is 1.163, so £200,000 becomes £232,642. London: £550,037 divided by £529,788 is 1.038, so £200,000 becomes £207,644. All figures are the UK House Price Index average prices for July of each year, from the UK House Price Index’s July 2026 data download.
The same £200,000 home gained about £40,000 more over those five years in the North East than in London. London prices fell 3.3% in the year to July 2026, the eleventh month in a row of annual falls there, while the North East rose 4.9%. England as a whole rose 1.1% to an average of £293,000, and Scotland 2.3% to £196,000.
Use the smallest area you can: the index publishes figures by local authority and by property type as well as by region, and a local figure will track your home more closely than a national one.
Treat the answer as a guide, not a price. The index tracks a typical home in the area, and its latest months are provisional and often revised as more sales are recorded.
Compare on price per square metre
Two three-bedroom houses on the same street can differ in size by a third, and buyers pay for space. Comparing on price per square metre takes most of that difference out.
Every energy performance certificate shows the home’s total floor area. The certificates are free to look up on the government’s energy certificate register, and Scotland has its own separate register. Take each comparable’s sold price, divide it by its floor area, and apply the typical figure to your own floor area.
- Find three to six recent sales of similar homes nearby on the sold prices service.
- Look up each one’s floor area on the energy certificate register.
- Work out the price per square metre for each, bringing any older sale up to date with the index first.
- Multiply the middle figure by your own floor area. That is your starting estimate.
If your figure sits well above every sale on the street, the market has not yet paid that much there, however good the house is.
What an estimate misses about your house
An instant online estimate is a useful starting point, but it has not been inside your house, so it misses what makes it better or worse than the homes it is being compared with.
The adjustments that move a price most are the ones a record does not hold:
- Condition. A dated kitchen, an old boiler or damp costs money a buyer will deduct.
- Layout and outside space. A usable garden, parking or a downstairs toilet can put a house ahead of the one next door.
- The position on the street. A main road, a view or an awkward neighbour shows up in the offers, not in the data.
- Legal and energy issues. A short lease, missing building control sign-off or a low energy rating can narrow the pool of buyers.
Our guide to what devalues a house covers these in detail. In Scotland, the Home Report a seller must usually commission before marketing includes a single survey by a chartered surveyor, which gives buyers more information about the condition and value of the home, according to the Scottish Government’s mygov.scot guidance.
If you own a rented home, the question has two answers, because an investor may price the rent rather than the bricks. We cover that in how much a rental property is worth.
What this means if you are thinking of selling
Base your number on what buyers have paid, not what sellers are asking. Rightmove’s figures, that 74% of homes sold this year needed no price cut and that on average 61% of homes listed find a buyer, both point to the first asking price mattering. A house launched too high can sit while buyers look at the rest of the street.
Run the four checks, write down a range rather than a single figure, and be honest about what your house has that the comparables did not, and what it lacks. If the range still feels wide, that is normal. A home someone will live in is priced against sold homes nearby. A let or investment property is usually priced differently, on the rent it makes and the return an investor needs, not the street.
Get a free desktop valuation, evidence-backed and yours whether you sell or not. We introduce sellers to investor buyers, and if yours is a let or investment property you can also see the kind of stock our buyers are taking.