In Plymouth, a terraced house in the city's cheapest postcode district sells for a median of £245,000. In its dearest district, three-and-a-half miles away, a terraced house sells for exactly the same: £245,000. Yet the overall median price in those two districts is £110,000 apart. All of that gap comes not from location, but from what each area is built of — one is packed with flats, the other with detached houses and semis.
That is the trap hidden inside almost every "average house price by area" figure. An area median blends together whatever property types happen to sit there. Two districts can look wildly different on price while the same home — a two-bed terrace, say — costs much the same in both. To separate a genuine location premium from a stock-mix illusion, you have to compare like with like.
We did that for seven English cities, using HM Land Registry price-paid records for standard residential sales completed in 2025. The result is a spectrum: in some cities the gap between the cheapest and dearest postcode district is almost entirely about house type; in others it is a real, like-for-like location premium.
How we measured it
For each city we took the cheapest and the dearest postcode district (outcode) by overall median price, counting only districts with a reasonable sample. Then we measured two things:
- The overall gap — the difference between the two districts' median sale prices across all house types (detached, semi-detached, terraced and flats).
- The same-terrace gap — the difference in the terraced-house median between the very same two districts. Terraced homes are the most consistent like-for-like anchor: nearly every city has plenty of them at both the cheap and the dear end.
From those we derive a single figure, the share of the gap that is house-type mix: one minus (the same-terrace gap divided by the overall gap). A reading near 100% means the same terrace costs almost the same in both districts, so the headline gap is driven by composition — the dear district simply holds the detached houses the cheap one lacks. A reading near 0% means the identical terrace genuinely costs far more in the sought-after district: a real location premium.
None of this values any individual property. These are medians of recorded transactions, grouped by postcode district and property type.
The ranking
| City | Cheapest district | Dearest district | Overall gap | Same-terrace gap | Share that is house-type mix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plymouth | PL1 £185,000 | PL9 £295,000 | £110,000 (1.59×) | £0 (£245k vs £245k) | ~100% |
| Portsmouth | PO5 £222,000 | PO6 £310,000 | £88,000 (1.40×) | £8,500 | 90% |
| Nottingham | NG7 £178,500 | NG8 £235,000 | £56,500 (1.32×) | £19,000 | 66% |
| Hull | HU3 £118,500 | HU7 £170,000 | £51,500 (1.43×) | £28,000 | 46% |
| Bradford | BD3 £105,000 | LS29 £410,000 | £305,000 (3.90×) | £220,000 | 28% |
| Sheffield | S4 £105,000 | S11 £380,000 | £275,000 (3.62×) | £227,500 | 17% |
| Leicester | LE3 £205,000 | LE5 £271,000 | £66,000 (1.32×) | £68,250 | ~0% |
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, standard residential sales (categories D/S/T/F) completed in 2025. LS29 (Ilkley) is part of the City of Bradford metropolitan district. "×" is the ratio of dearest to cheapest median.
Where the gap is mostly house type
At the top of the table sit the dense, flat-heavy port cities, where the headline gap is largely an illusion of composition.
Plymouth is the cleanest example on record. Its cheapest district, PL1 (the city centre, Barbican and Hoe), is 66% flats and just 0.3% detached — cheap apartments drag the all-types median down to £185,000. Its dearest, PL9 (Plymstock and the south-eastern suburbs), is the mirror image: 71% houses (31% detached, 41% semi) and a median of £295,000. But a terraced house sells for a median of £245,000 in both. The £110,000 gap is entirely about the flats-versus-houses mix — hence a house-type share of roughly 100%. You can see the underlying data for either end on the Homecost postcode tool.
Portsmouth tells nearly the same story, which is why it reads much like its neighbour on the Portsmouth island-versus-mainland price study. The cheapest district, PO5 (Southsea), is 56% flats; the dearest, PO6 (Cosham and the mainland), is 51% houses. Terraced homes are only £8,500 apart across the two (£290,000 versus £298,500) — so 90% of the £88,000 headline gap is composition, not a location premium on the same house.
Nottingham is a milder version: NG7 (Radford, Lenton) carries more flats and terraces, while NG8 (Wollaton) is 73% houses. The terraced gap is £19,000 against an overall gap of £56,500 — about two-thirds house-type mix.
Where the gap is a genuine location premium
At the other end of the table, the gap survives the like-for-like test — the identical terrace really does cost far more in the desirable district.
Sheffield has one of the widest price geographies of any English city, and it is real. A terraced house in S4 (Burngreave, Pitsmoor) sells for a median of £100,000; in S11 (Ecclesall, Nether Edge) the same type sells for £327,500 — more than three times as much. Because terraces alone stretch that far, only about 17% of Sheffield's cheapest-to-dearest gap is down to house-type mix. This is a location premium in the truest sense, as the wider Sheffield house-price picture shows.
Bradford looks the most extreme of all — a 3.9× spread — because its dearest district is LS29 (Ilkley), the Victorian spa town that, for local-government purposes, sits inside the City of Bradford district. Ilkley's stone terraces carry a median of about £320,000 against £100,000 for a terrace in inner-city BD3, so most of the gap is a genuine premium (about 28% house-type mix). Even excluding Ilkley and using Baildon (BD17) as the dear end, Bradford stays firmly location-driven.
Leicester is the purest location case. A terraced house in LE3 (the western wards) sells for a median of £180,000; in LE5 (Evington and the east) it sells for £248,250. That £68,250 same-terrace gap is actually wider than the £66,000 all-types gap — meaning essentially none of the difference is composition. Whatever you buy in LE5, you pay a premium for the postcode.
Hull: the middle case
Hull sits squarely between the two camps, which is why it makes a useful reference. Its cheapest robust district, HU3 (west of the centre), is 73% terraces; its dearest, HU7 (Kingswood, Bransholme's newer estates), is 57% houses. The same-terrace gap of £28,000 is a little over half the £51,500 overall gap, so roughly 46% of the difference is house-type mix and the rest a modest location premium — a pattern set out in more detail in the Hull house prices by postcode study.
What this means when you compare areas
The practical takeaway is narrow but useful: an area's headline average tells you what is for sale there as much as what location costs. A district that looks cheap may simply be flat-heavy; a district that looks dear may just hold the detached stock. If you are comparing two postcodes for the same kind of home, the like-for-like figure — the median for that property type — is the honest comparison, not the blended average.
It is the same reason a city's mean and median can drift apart, examined in the median-versus-mean price-gap study, and why some cities have a far flatter price geography across their postcodes than others. For a size-adjusted view that strips out house type another way, the price-per-square-foot ranking compares cities on floor area rather than headline price.
You can pull the median, property-type mix and running-cost picture for any postcode — including both ends of the cities above — from the Homecost postcode tool, or browse the rest of our market analysis.
Figures throughout are medians of recorded sales from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for 2025, not valuations of any individual property. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting on any purchase.