The UK's sub-£150k housing market has shrunk 39% since 2021

Fewer than 64,000 homes sold for under £150,000 across England and Wales in 2025 — down 39% from the 105,504 sold in that price band in 2021, even though the overall market fell by only 25% over the same five years. The cheap end of the market is shrinking roughly one and a half times faster than the market around it, according to a review of HM Land Registry Price Paid data (fetched 2026-10-11).

The numbers, year by year

The table below covers standard residential sales (category A) across detached, semi-detached, terraced and flat properties, England and Wales, 2021-2025.

Two things stand out. First, the sub-£150,000 segment is disappearing faster than the market itself — its share of all sales fell from 9.8% to 7.9% over the five years, not just its raw count. Second, almost all of the fall happened early: the band dropped from 105,504 sales in 2021 to 64,222 in 2023, a 39% collapse in two years, then flattened out — 64,222, 63,744 and 63,934 across 2023, 2024 and 2025 are, in practical terms, the same number. Whatever pushed cheap stock out of the market did most of its work by 2023; the last two years look like a plateau, not a continuing slide.

The pattern repeats at a single price point. Exactly 5,996 homes sold for £125,000 in 2021; by 2025 that had fallen to 4,006 — a 33% drop, tracking the wider band closely.

Why: prices rose, the cheap band didn't keep up

The ONS/gov.uk UK House Price Index for England rose from 87.4 in January 2021 to 100.5 in January 2025 — a 15.0% increase (latest reading: 102.6 in June 2026). As typical prices moved up by roughly a sixth, a fixed price band like £110,000–£150,000 captures a narrower slice of the market each year: homes that would have traded in that range in 2021 increasingly sell above £150,000 instead, and fewer homes enter the band from below. This is a mechanical effect of inflation acting on a fixed cash threshold — the same dynamic documented elsewhere in where a 5% deposit buys the average home and in the first-time-buyer threshold analyses below — not a claim about future prices, and not evidence on its own of a shortage of any particular type of home.

Where sub-£150k homes are still selling

The segment hasn't vanished — it has concentrated. Ranking postcode districts by the number of £110,000–£150,000 sales recorded in 2025 shows a clear, almost entirely northern and Welsh pattern:

Every one of the ten busiest districts for this price band sits outside the South East. Stoke-on-Trent and Blackpool each place two districts in the top ten, and Hull's HU5 leads the table outright. One recent example from Land Registry data: a terraced house on Belvoir Street in HU5 sold for £115,000 in October 2025 — squarely inside the shrinking band. You can look up the sale history and EPC rating of homes on that street, or any UK postcode, using Homecost's postcode tool.

What this means for the thresholds around it

The £125,000 figure matters beyond being a round number — it is also England's zero-rate Stamp Duty Land Tax threshold for standard home movers. As fewer transactions happen at and below that level, fewer buyers encounter the lowest SDLT band at all; the £125,000 SDLT bunching analysis shows how sharply sales still cluster just under that line even as the overall pool shrinks. The regional concentration above also lines up with where first-time buyers can still buy under £300,000 — the same northern and Welsh districts recur. And for anyone pricing a mortgage at this end of the market, the monthly cost of a £150,000 mortgage sets out the repayment arithmetic.

This analysis draws on 4,258,280 Land Registry Price Paid transactions (category A, England and Wales, 2021-2025) and the ONS/gov.uk UK House Price Index. More market data and methodology notes are available on the Homecost blog.