Cheap to Buy Doesn't Mean Cheap to Heat: England's 2026 EPC Map

Across England's 164 shire (non-metropolitan) districts, the price of a home and how expensive it is to run turn out to be almost unrelated. Using 2025 completed sales from HM Land Registry and the most recent domestic Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) for every home the register can match to an address, the share of dwellings rated EPC band C or above ranges from 23.4% in Castle Point, Essex to 58.7% in South Derbyshire — a two-and-a-half-fold spread.

Yet those two districts sit only about £107,000 apart on median price, and the cheaper of the pair is the greener one. That single comparison undercuts a common assumption: that the cheapest areas to buy in must also be the hardest — and costliest — to heat.

Measured across all 164 districts, the relationship is close to non-existent. The correlation between a district's 2025 median sale price and its share of energy-efficient homes is +0.08 — statistically almost nothing. Sort the districts into four equal price bands and the efficient-home share barely moves:

The cheapest quarter of districts averages 39.6% of homes at band C or above; the dearest quarter, 42.1% — a gap of barely two and a half percentage points across a price range that runs from £135,000 to £654,000. For comparison, the England and Wales figure for the whole matched housing stock is around 39.9% at band C or above, so shire districts as a group sit slightly above the national average.

Cheap does not mean cold

The idea that the cheapest areas are the hardest to heat comes from real places. The former mill and mining towns of the North West and the East Midlands — where dense Victorian terraces dominate — genuinely combine low prices with low ratings. We looked at exactly that pattern in the terraced streets of East Lancashire, where the three cheapest districts in England are also among the least energy-efficient.

But it is not a national rule. Within the most affordable tier of districts — those with a 2025 median at or below £260,000 — the C-or-above share runs the full width of the range:

The same modest budget buys anything from roughly one home in four rated C or above to nearly three in five, depending only on where in the country you look. Price is not the signal.

The least energy-efficient districts span the price range

If low prices do not explain poor ratings, what does the bottom of the table look like? Here are the eight shire districts with the smallest share of C-or-above homes:

What links these districts is not a low price — Castle Point (£365,000), Watford (£417,500) and Rother (£355,000) all sit well above the national median — but the age and type of their housing. Castle Point, which tops the list of least-efficient districts, is not a cheap area at all; it is an Essex commuter district whose stock is dominated by interwar and post-war coastal housing on Canvey Island, much of it hard to insulate.

The greenest shire districts — cheap and dear alike

The top of the range tells the same story in reverse. The most energy-efficient districts include both affordable and expensive places:

Two kinds of place cluster here: the growth corridors of the Oxford-to-Cambridge arc (Cherwell, Vale of White Horse, South Cambridgeshire) and the Kent Thames Gateway (Ashford, Dartford), and the new-build belt of the East Midlands (South Derbyshire and the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire districts). What they have in common is a large share of housing built since the 2000s — and that, not price, is what drives the rating.

Build era, not price, sets the bill

A home's EPC band tracks the era it was built in almost step by step. Looking across the whole domestic register, the share of homes at band C or above rises sharply with each generation of building standards:

A property built after 2003 is roughly five times as likely to reach band C as one built before 1945. The reason is successive tightenings of the Building Regulations (Part L, covering conservation of fuel and power): cavity-wall and loft insulation, double glazing and condensing boilers became standard, then near-universal, in new homes.

That gradient explains the district map. Pendle — near the bottom of the national table at 23.8% C+ — has around 61% of its certified homes built before 1930, overwhelmingly solid-wall terraces that are expensive and disruptive to insulate. South Derbyshire, at the top of the table on 58.7%, has only about 14% pre-1930 stock and a heavy layer of recent estate building around Swadlincote and the A38 corridor. Cherwell, home to the large planned expansion at Bicester, sits at 55.1% for the same reason. A district's greenness, in other words, is set by when its homes were built — and cheap districts can be old (the Pennine mill towns) or new (the Midlands growth districts) with equal ease.

Solid-wall homes — typically anything built before the 1930s — are the hardest and most costly to bring up to a modern standard, because external or internal wall insulation is far more expensive than filling a cavity. The Energy Saving Trust sets out the difference between cavity and solid-wall insulation in its home-energy guidance.

What a low rating costs — and the caveats

A poorer EPC band means higher modelled running costs, and the gap between bands is real: you can see how it stacks up in our breakdown of what a poor EPC rating adds to a three-bedroom semi's running costs. Two caveats matter, though.

First, the running-cost figures printed on an EPC use standardised assumptions and a fixed set of fuel prices; they are useful for comparing one home against another, but the absolute pounds-per-year number will not match a specific household's actual bill. Treat the ranking as reliable and the cash figure as indicative only. Our guide to how EPC ratings work explains what the certificate does and does not tell you.

Second, these shares are drawn from homes that carry a current certificate the register can match to an address. Not every home has an EPC, and a slice of certificates cannot be linked to a specific address, so the figures describe the certified, matchable stock in each district rather than every dwelling. They are large samples — several thousand certificates per district — but samples nonetheless.

The council tax Band D figures shown are the 2026-27 amounts for each billing authority (gov.uk). Band D is a benchmark, not the bill most people pay: most homes in these districts sit in Bands A to C, so a typical charge is lower than the Band D headline.

Check any postcode before you buy

The headline lesson for anyone comparing areas is that a low asking price tells you nothing about what a home will cost to heat. Two houses at the same price, one built in 1900 and one in 2015, can be a full EPC band — or several — apart. That difference shows up every month on the energy bill and, increasingly, in what it costs to bring an older home up to standard.

You can check both sides of the ledger for any street with Homecost. Enter a postcode — for example, a Burnley postcode in one of England's cheapest-but-oldest districts — to see recent sale prices, EPC ratings and an estimate of the all-in monthly cost of running each home. For the wider picture, see how the cheapest shire districts to buy in compare, or how the greenest housing stock among the major cities is distributed. More data features like this one are in our market analysis section.

This is general information, not financial or energy advice. Energy costs quoted on EPCs are modelled estimates and will differ from actual bills. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.

Based on more than 280,000 HM Land Registry sales completed in 2025 and 3.88 million current domestic energy certificates across 164 English shire districts. Browse all Homecost guides.