Price per square foot: 19 UK cities ranked for 2026
Headline house prices tell you what a home costs. They don't tell you what you get for the money. A £250,000 terrace in Hull and a £250,000 flat on the edge of inner London carry the same price tag — but one is roughly three-and-a-half times the floor space of the other.
Price per square foot strips out that difference. It divides what buyers actually paid by the floor area they actually got, turning a jumble of two-bed flats and four-bed detached houses into a single, comparable measure: how expensive space itself is in each place.
Using every HM Land Registry sale completed in 2025 that could be matched to an Energy Performance Certificate — the document that records a property's verified internal floor area — the median price paid across England and Wales worked out at £309 per square foot. The gap between cities, though, is vast: from roughly £599 per square foot in London down to £171 in Hull, a 3.5-fold difference. (All figures accessed 27 June 2026.)
The 2026 ranking
The table below ranks 19 major cities by the median price paid per square foot in 2025. The final column translates that rate into something more tangible: how much floor space a £250,000 budget buys at each city's going rate.
| Rank | City | Median £/sq ft | Sales analysed | Floor space £250k buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | London (all boroughs) | £599 | 45,643 | ~420 sq ft |
| 2 | Bath | £406 | 2,037 | ~620 sq ft |
| 3 | Bristol | £394 | 4,196 | ~630 sq ft |
| 4 | Cardiff | £309 | 3,514 | ~810 sq ft |
| 5 | Manchester | £304 | 2,905 | ~820 sq ft |
| 6 | Norwich | £293 | 1,543 | ~850 sq ft |
| 7 | Leeds | £286 | 8,316 | ~870 sq ft |
| 8 | Birmingham | £280 | 7,378 | ~890 sq ft |
| 9 | Leicester | £275 | 1,905 | ~910 sq ft |
| 10 | Coventry | £267 | 3,065 | ~940 sq ft |
| 11 | Derby | £261 | 2,646 | ~960 sq ft |
| 12 | Sheffield | £260 | 4,990 | ~960 sq ft |
| 13 | Plymouth | £254 | 3,123 | ~980 sq ft |
| 14 | Newport | £251 | 1,894 | ~1,000 sq ft |
| 15 | Nottingham | £240 | 2,346 | ~1,040 sq ft |
| 16 | Newcastle upon Tyne | £230 | 2,792 | ~1,090 sq ft |
| 17 | Swansea | £223 | 2,529 | ~1,120 sq ft |
| 18 | Liverpool | £218 | 3,600 | ~1,150 sq ft |
| 19 | Hull | £171 | 2,540 | ~1,460 sq ft |
Median price per square foot, completed sales in 2025, matched to EPC floor area. Based on HM Land Registry transactions and the Energy Performance of Buildings register; figures accessed 27 June 2026.
What £250,000 actually buys
The same budget behaves very differently across the country. At London's median rate, £250,000 stretches to about 420 square feet — a compact one-bed flat, roughly 39 square metres. Carry that same £250,000 to Hull and it covers around 1,460 square feet (about 136 square metres), comfortably a three- or four-bedroom house.
In between, the northern and Midlands cities cluster tightly. £250,000 buys roughly 820 square feet in Manchester, 870 in Leeds, 890 in Birmingham and 960 in Sheffield — broadly the difference between a small two-bed and a roomy three-bed for an identical outlay. Cardiff (£309) sits exactly on the national median, the dividing line between the cities where space costs more than the typical English-and-Welsh sale and those where it costs less.
Why the gap is so wide
Three forces pull these numbers apart.
Land, not bricks. The cost of construction varies little across the country; the cost of the ground underneath does. In the most sought-after cities, buyers are paying for location and scarcity of plots, and that premium lands squarely on the per-square-foot figure.
The mix of homes sold. Flats command a higher price per square foot than houses almost everywhere, because a chunk of their value is the location rather than the floorplan. Cities with flat-heavy markets — London above all — therefore post higher headline £/sq ft rates than house-dominated markets such as Hull, Liverpool or Swansea, where larger terraced and semi-detached stock pulls the average down.
Aggregation hides extremes. London's £599 is a 33-borough average that conceals an enormous internal range — prime central boroughs sit far above it while outer-east boroughs sit well below. Our look at the most expensive postcodes in the UK and the wider average house price in London for 2026 show just how much variation a single city-wide number can mask. The same caveat applies, to a lesser degree, in every city on the list.
None of this is a forecast or a verdict on whether any city is "good value" — that depends on what a buyer needs from a home. These are simply the rates the market settled at last year.
How these figures were calculated
Every quantitative claim here comes from first-party data:
- Prices are completed residential sales from HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data for 2025, the most recent full year on the register. Only standard "category A" sales (excluding repossessions and bulk transfers) are counted.
- Floor areas come from the Energy Performance of Buildings register for England and Wales, which records each property's verified internal floor area — a measured figure, not an estate agent's estimate.
- The metric is the sale price divided by the EPC-recorded floor area, converted from square metres to square feet. Only sales that could be matched to an EPC are included, which is why the sample sizes (1,500 to 45,000 per city) are a robust subset rather than every sale. Records with floor areas below 20 m² or above 500 m² were excluded as likely data-entry errors, and the median is reported throughout because it is far less sensitive to a handful of unusual sales than the average.
- Cities are defined by local authority area, mapped from the ONS Postcode Directory, so each figure reflects the administrative city rather than the wider postcode region.
Crucially, these are market averages across thousands of sales — not a valuation of any individual property. Homecost reports what was paid, never what a specific home is worth.
See the cost of space for your own street
A city-wide median is a starting point, not an answer for a particular street. Homecost lets you drill down to any postcode and see what nearby homes actually sold for, alongside their floor areas and full running costs.
- Start with a postcode — for example Manchester's M1 1AE or Liverpool's L1 8JQ — to see real sold prices and the all-in cost of living there.
- Compare two markets line by line in our cost of buying in London versus Manchester breakdown.
- See how the same cities rank on energy efficiency in our guide to the greenest housing stock by UK city, or browse the full market analysis archive.
Space is one of the few things in the property market you can measure exactly. Where it is cheap, and where it is dear, is written plainly in the data.