Homes selling for the same price in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and London don't carry the same odds of a good energy rating — but holding price constant turns out to test something more interesting than a straightforward "which city is greener" question. Looking only at 2025 sales priced £230,000–£260,000, the share of homes rated EPC C or above ranges from 30.5% in Birmingham to 53.4% in Manchester, a wider spread than the same four cities showed when every price point was counted together.
Why fix the price at all
A citywide comparison of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and London found that cheaper cities aren't reliably greener — pooling every 2025 sale regardless of price, "cheaper city = better EPC" held in only half of the six possible pairings. One explanation is that a cheaper city simply sells a different mix of homes. Fixing the price band instead asks a sharper question: among homes that cost roughly the same amount to buy, does the city-level gap survive?
£230,000–£260,000 sits close to Birmingham's (£239,000), Leeds's (£250,000) and Manchester's (£253,000) own 2025 medians, so for three of the four cities this band is close to "a typical local sale". For London, where the 2025 median was £530,000, it is not — which turns out to matter.
The same band, four very different markets
| City | 2025 sales in band | Share that are flats | EPC-certified | EPC C+ (of certified) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birmingham | 1,432 | 10.0% | 1,173 (81.9%) | 30.5% |
| Leeds | 1,309 | 6.5% | 1,133 (86.6%) | 43.5% |
| Manchester | 657 | 37.0% | 399 (60.7%) | 53.4% |
| London (33 boroughs) | 2,101 | 91.2% | 807 (38.4%) | 52.8% |
Source: HM Land Registry 2025 Price Paid Data (category A, full market value) joined to the latest Energy Performance Certificate on record for each address, fetched 1 November 2026.
In Birmingham and Leeds, this band is overwhelmingly houses — unsurprising, since it sits right on their medians. In London, it's almost entirely flats (91.2%), because a London house rarely sells this cheap; £230,000–£260,000 captures a thin, specific slice of the London market rather than anything representative of it. Manchester sits in between, with a genuine mix of both.
Birmingham's gap widens, not narrows
The citywide comparison found Manchester vs Birmingham was the widest EPC gap of the four cities (15.0 percentage points, 41.2% vs 26.2%) despite being the smallest price gap of any pairing (1.06×) — evidence that the difference is a fixed property of each city rather than something price-driven. Holding price constant sharpens that finding rather than softening it: the same two cities' gap widens to 22.9 points (53.4% vs 30.5%) once both are compared at an identical price. Birmingham vs Manchester remains the clearest case in this dataset of two cities with near-identical buying costs and very different housing stock.
Every city's in-band figure beats its own citywide one — Birmingham +4.3 points, Leeds +7.7, Manchester +12.2 — which fits a simple explanation: £230,000–£260,000 sits above the very cheapest, oldest terraces each city has to offer, so excluding that colder tail lifts every city's number somewhat. Birmingham's rise is the smallest of the four, which is why it stays clearly last.
London's near-tie with Manchester is a different kind of home, not the same city rated differently
London is the outlier. Citywide, London's 31.7% C-or-above share sits closer to Birmingham's than Manchester's — second-coldest of the four, not a contender for the top. Within this one price band, London's share jumps to 52.8%, landing within half a point of Manchester's 53.4%, a near-tie among cities that were 9.5 points apart citywide.
That's not the same city performing differently at a different price — it's a different category of home. In this band, Manchester's sales are 37.0% flats and London's are 91.2% flats. Newer, smaller flats tend to rate better than older houses regardless of city, so a band that happens to force London into comparing mostly flats against Manchester's mixed stock will narrow the apparent gap for reasons that have nothing to do with which city has the warmer homes overall.
A caveat on London's number
London's certification match rate in this band — 38.4% of sales have any EPC certificate on record — is well below Birmingham's 81.9%, Leeds's 86.6% or even Manchester's 60.7%. The usual explanation for low EPC match rates on this site is a new-build address-matching gap between the Land Registry and the EPC register, documented for London's flat stock elsewhere — but it doesn't apply here: only 1.5% of London's 1,916 flats in this band were new-build. The lower match rate in this specific band is unexplained by that mechanism, and London's 52.8% figure rests on a thinner, less-than-two-fifths-certified base than the other three cities. Treat it as indicative rather than conclusive.
What this means if you're comparing cities
A price band is not a controlled experiment — it can hold the cost of a home constant while quietly changing what kind of home you're looking at. Birmingham's position as the coldest of these four cities holds up under a tougher test than a simple citywide average; London's apparent improvement mostly reflects that £230,000–£260,000 buys a flat there and a house almost everywhere else.
Based on 5,499 Land Registry transactions and 3,512 matched EPC certificates across the four cities (2025 data, fetched 1 November 2026) — browse more market data analysis on Homecost. To see how a real property in this band rates, try 33 Nevendon Drive, Manchester, a terraced house that sold for £260,000 in September 2025 with a C rating.