Which cities have the most leasehold houses in 2026?

A flat is almost always leasehold: of the flats sold across England and Wales in 2025, 97.7% were leasehold rather than freehold (HM Land Registry). A house is the opposite — nationally, just 6.35% of the houses that changed hands in 2025 were leasehold. So the working assumption most buyers carry is roughly right: buy a flat, expect a lease; buy a house, expect to own the freehold.

Except in a handful of cities, where that assumption breaks down. In Salford, two in five houses sold in 2025 were leasehold. In Manchester it was more than one in five, and in Liverpool around one in six. A buyer looking at an otherwise ordinary terraced or semi-detached house in these places is far more likely to find a lease attached than the national figure suggests — and a lease can carry costs and rules a freehold does not.

Here is the national picture by property type, and then the major cities ranked by how common leasehold houses actually are.

Leasehold is a flat thing — mostly

Figures are category-A sales — ordinary open-market transfers — completed in 2025, from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data.

The pattern makes sense for flats. A block needs shared responsibility for the roof, the structure and the common parts, and the leasehold system is the traditional mechanism for that in England and Wales. A house does not need it, which is why the national leasehold-house share is so low. The interesting question is where that low average hides a very different local reality.

The major cities, ranked by leasehold-house share

Only sales of detached, semi-detached and terraced houses are counted here — flats are excluded — for category-A transactions completed in 2025, with at least 300 house sales per city. Each city is its billing-authority area as defined by its local-authority code, so "Manchester" is the City of Manchester council area, not Greater Manchester.

Two things stand out. First, the top of the table is a North West and Midlands story: Salford (40.0%), Manchester (22.3%) and Liverpool (17.3%) lead, with Birmingham (10.6%) the largest Midlands entry. Second, the range is enormous. A house buyer in Portsmouth (0.7%) or Leeds (1.9%) was almost certain to be buying a freehold; a buyer in Manchester was roughly twelve times as likely to be buying leasehold as one in Leeds — two comparably large northern cities — and the gap from top to bottom of the table is more than fiftyfold.

The absolute numbers are not small, either. Salford recorded about 930 leasehold house sales in 2025, Birmingham around 830, and Manchester and Liverpool roughly 650 each. You can see how those cities compare on price and running cost in the guides to the average house price in Manchester and elsewhere.

Why the North West and the Midlands?

Two forces sit behind the map. The first is history: across the North West and parts of the Midlands, houses were traditionally sold on long building leases granted by large landed estates, leaving a legacy of leasehold houses that still changes hands today. The second is more recent — during the 2010s a wave of new-build houses was sold as leasehold, with the freehold retained or sold on separately, a practice concentrated in these regions and one the government has since moved to curb.

Neither is a verdict on any individual home or seller; it is simply where the leasehold-house stock happens to sit. The concentration is sharper still in the smaller districts around these cities, as the breakdown of why leasehold houses cluster in the North West shows.

What a lease adds to the cost

Leasehold is not automatically expensive, but it introduces cost lines and obligations a freehold house does not have:

• Ground rent. Historically an annual payment to the freeholder. The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 restricts ground rent on most new long residential leases to a peppercorn — effectively nothing — but older leases can still carry a rising ground rent.
• Service or estate charges. Where there are shared grounds or a management company, residents pay towards upkeep. These vary widely from one development to another; see what new-build service charges typically look like.
• Lease length. A short lease — broadly, under about 80 years — can be harder to mortgage and more expensive to extend, and extending the lease or buying the freehold carries its own cost.
• The freeholder's consent. Alterations, subletting or keeping a pet can need permission, sometimes for a fee.

The law here is changing. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 legislates to make lease extensions and freehold purchases cheaper and simpler, and the government has stated its intention to end the sale of new leasehold houses and to expand commonhold, an alternative form of ownership. Not all of those provisions are yet in force, and the detail matters, so the current position is worth confirming before you commit.

How to check before you buy

Tenure is recorded on a property's Land Registry title, and a conveyancer confirms it — along with the lease length, the ground rent and any service charge — before exchange. The all-in monthly cost of a home is more than the mortgage and the council tax; on a leasehold property, the lease terms are part of that sum. You can see the mortgage, council tax and energy picture for any street with the Homecost postcode tool, and read what freehold and leasehold actually mean for what you pay before you view.

Based on more than 650,000 Land Registry house sales completed in 2025 and each authority's published records — explore more buyer guides or the full guide library.

Speak to a qualified conveyancer or adviser before acting.