If you have ever looked up the "average house price" for your city, the figure you saw was almost certainly higher than what a typical buyer actually paid. Across England and Wales, homes that changed hands in 2025 sold for a median of £295,000 — the true midpoint, where half of all sales were cheaper and half were dearer. The mean, the simple add-them-up-and-divide average that most headlines quote, was £371,658. That is a gap of £76,658 on exactly the same set of 778,998 recorded sales (HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, retrieved 10 August 2026). The average, in other words, sits about 26% above the typical purchase.
The distinction matters because the two numbers answer different questions — and only one of them tells you what the middle of the market costs.
Why the average runs ahead of the typical
House prices are right-skewed. Most homes cluster in a broad middle band, but a smaller number of very expensive sales stretch a long way above it. A £2m detached house has no mirror-image £2m-below-zero counterpart to balance it, so the top tail pulls the mean upward. The median ignores that tail entirely: it simply lines every sale up from cheapest to dearest and reports the one in the middle.
Put another way, the mean answers "what was the average pound spent on housing?" while the median answers "what did the buyer in the middle actually pay?" For anyone budgeting for a home, the median is the more honest guide.
How far apart the two figures land depends on how long a market's expensive tail is. Where a city has a cluster of prime streets — riverside frontage, Georgian terraces, gated suburbs — the mean races ahead of the median. Where the housing stock is uniform, the two figures nearly meet.
The median–mean gap across 24 UK cities
The table below shows both figures for 2025 sales, calculated the same way in every market: standard (non-repossession) sales of houses and flats, taken directly from the Land Registry Price Paid dataset. "Gap" is the mean minus the median; the final column is how many times larger the mean is than the median.
| City | 2025 sales | Median | Mean ("average") | Gap | Mean ÷ median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hull | 2,890 | £142,000 | £154,668 | £12,668 | 1.09 |
| Sunderland | 3,246 | £157,500 | £179,303 | £21,803 | 1.14 |
| Liverpool | 4,711 | £182,500 | £223,731 | £41,231 | 1.23 |
| Bradford | 6,663 | £186,500 | £226,729 | £40,229 | 1.22 |
| Nottingham | 2,835 | £200,000 | £223,929 | £23,929 | 1.12 |
| Newcastle upon Tyne | 3,466 | £205,000 | £250,180 | £45,180 | 1.22 |
| Swansea | 2,971 | £207,500 | £244,970 | £37,470 | 1.18 |
| Sheffield | 6,179 | £218,000 | £260,345 | £42,345 | 1.19 |
| Derby | 3,044 | £220,000 | £242,484 | £22,484 | 1.10 |
| Plymouth | 3,804 | £226,000 | £246,795 | £20,795 | 1.09 |
| Coventry | 3,602 | £230,000 | £253,345 | £23,345 | 1.10 |
| Norwich | 1,874 | £235,000 | £265,245 | £30,245 | 1.13 |
| Birmingham | 9,550 | £238,000 | £274,118 | £36,118 | 1.15 |
| Leicester | 2,294 | £242,000 | £255,035 | £13,035 | 1.05 |
| Leeds | 9,992 | £248,000 | £287,884 | £39,884 | 1.16 |
| Manchester | 4,735 | £250,000 | £291,036 | £41,036 | 1.16 |
| Portsmouth | 2,445 | £259,000 | £301,843 | £42,843 | 1.17 |
| Southampton | 2,698 | £260,000 | £278,308 | £18,308 | 1.07 |
| Cardiff | 4,503 | £270,000 | £316,487 | £46,487 | 1.17 |
| Exeter | 1,694 | £300,000 | £351,199 | £51,199 | 1.17 |
| Solihull | 2,861 | £330,000 | £389,270 | £59,270 | 1.18 |
| Bristol | 6,089 | £350,000 | £403,129 | £53,129 | 1.15 |
| Bath | 2,726 | £400,000 | £504,447 | £104,447 | 1.26 |
| London (all boroughs) | 83,335 | £530,000 | £702,381 | £172,381 | 1.33 |
London has the widest gap — but it is not alone
London's mean sale price (£702,381) sits £172,381 above its median (£530,000) — the mean is 1.33 times the midpoint, the widest divergence of any market in the table. That is the arithmetic of a market with the country's deepest prime tail: a comparatively small number of multi-million-pound sales in the central boroughs is enough to lift the average for all 83,335 sales well above what a typical London buyer paid. The full picture is in our London house price breakdown, and the streets driving that tail appear in the most expensive postcodes in the UK.
Bath is second, with a mean of £504,447 against a £400,000 median — a £104,447 gap built on its dense stock of prime Georgian terraces (see the full Bath house price picture). The same effect drives Cornwall's numbers, where a coastal prime tail lifts the average well clear of the typical inland sale, as our Cornwall house price guide sets out.
The counterintuitive part: some affordable cities show a big relative gap
You might expect the widest gaps only in expensive markets. They are not. Bradford's median is just £186,500, yet its mean is £226,729 — a 21.6% premium, one of the widest relative gaps in the table. The reason is administrative geography: the City of Bradford district reaches up Wharfedale to affluent Ilkley, whose high-value sales pull the district-wide average up sharply against an otherwise modest median. Liverpool (mean 1.23 times its median) and Newcastle (1.22 times) show the same shape — a low, dense median plus a thin band of expensive suburban sales.
The lesson is that a raw average can mislead most where a cheap city contains a pocket of expensive stock. The mean quietly folds that pocket into a single headline number; the median filters it out.
Where the average barely moves
At the other end sit the most uniformly built cities. Leicester's mean (£255,035) is only 5.4% above its median (£242,000) — the tightest gap here. Southampton's mean runs just 7.0% ahead of its median, and Hull posts the smallest cash gap of all: a mean of £154,668 against a £142,000 median, only £12,668 apart. These are densely and consistently built cities without a long prime tail, so the "average" you read is close to what most buyers there actually pay.
What to do with a price figure when you see one
None of this makes the mean "wrong" — it is a perfectly valid statistic, and official indices such as the ONS/Land Registry UK House Price Index go further still, mix-adjusting to control for the type and mix of homes selling each month. But the underlying point holds: a plain average of sale prices usually overstates the typical purchase, sometimes by tens of thousands of pounds, and the median is the better guide to the middle of the market.
Three things worth remembering:
- A quoted "average house price" is usually a mean, and a mean usually sits above what the typical buyer paid.
- The median is the more representative figure for a normal purchase — it is unmoved by a handful of prime sales.
- Neither number tells you what any individual home is worth. For that, the only reliable evidence is what comparable properties on the actual street have recently sold for.
That last point is where recorded sale prices earn their keep. Rather than reading a citywide average, you can look up any postcode and see the real, completed transactions behind it — try a central London postcode to watch the prime tail in action, or a typical Manchester postcode to see a market where mean and median sit far closer together. You can browse more data-led pieces in our market analysis section.
Where these numbers come from
All figures are drawn from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data — the record of actual completed sales in England and Wales — for calendar year 2025, retrieved on 10 August 2026. The base is 778,998 standard-price (category A) residential sales of houses and flats; city figures use the same filter within each local authority, with London aggregated across all 33 boroughs. Median and mean are computed directly from the individual sale prices. Because Land Registry records are still being lodged for the most recent months, the 2025 totals will edge upward over time. These figures are historic and descriptive; they are not a valuation of any individual property, nor a forecast of future prices.