In Southampton, the most expensive postcode district costs about a quarter more than the cheapest. In Bradford, it costs more than four times as much. Both are single local authorities covering a broadly similar spread of homes — yet in one, a buyer's choice of postcode barely moves the price, and in the other it is one of the biggest levers there is.
This is a look at what you might call price geography: how much house prices vary from one part of a city to another. Using HM Land Registry Price Paid data for calendar year 2025 — 111,391 recorded residential sales across 27 English cities, retrieved on 12 August 2026 — we ranked each city by the gap between its dearest and cheapest postcode district.
How we measured it
A UK postcode has two halves. The first — the "outcode" or postcode district, such as SO14 or BD1 — locates you to a part of a town or city. For every city we took the median price paid in 2025 for each outcode with at least 40 recorded sales, then divided the dearest outcode's median by the cheapest.
A ratio close to 1 means prices barely move across the whole authority. A high ratio means one corner of the city is a different market entirely from another. We used the local-authority boundary (not the wider postcode area), counted only standard residential transactions — detached, semi-detached, terraced homes and flats sold at full market value — and dropped the smallest outcodes so that a handful of sales could not distort a district's median.
Every figure below is what buyers actually paid, recorded by HM Land Registry. None of it is an estimate of what any home, street or district is "worth".
The flattest cities: postcode barely changes the price
At the uniform end of the scale, the dearest district is rarely more than 1.5 times the cheapest.
| City | Spread (dearest ÷ cheapest) | Cheapest outcode (2025 median) | Dearest outcode (2025 median) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southampton | 1.25× | SO14 — £218,250 | SO18 — £272,500 |
| Sandwell | 1.37× | B66 — £185,000 | B43 — £253,500 |
| Wolverhampton | 1.38× | WV1 — £180,000 | WV4 — £249,250 |
| Portsmouth | 1.40× | PO5 — £222,000 | PO6 — £310,000 |
| Dudley | 1.44× | DY2 — £196,000 | DY4 — £283,000 |
| Norwich | 1.49× | NR3 — £212,500 | NR4 — £317,500 |
| Nottingham | 1.55× | NG1 — £151,250 | NG8 — £235,000 |
| Plymouth | 1.59× | PL1 — £185,000 | PL9 — £295,000 |
Two kinds of city dominate the flat end. The first is the dense, tightly-drawn coastal city: Southampton and Portsmouth are both hemmed in by water, largely built out in terraces and flats, with council boundaries that hug the urban core. The second is the Black Country: Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Dudley are among the most uniform authorities in England, built up in a near-continuous fabric of inter-war and post-war semis and terraces with few premium enclaves. In cities like these, the postcode you target is more about the house than the price bracket.
The widest cities: one authority, two housing markets
At the other end, the dearest outcode can be three or four times the cheapest.
| City | Spread (dearest ÷ cheapest) | Cheapest outcode (2025 median) | Dearest outcode (2025 median) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bradford | 4.32× | BD1 — £95,000 | LS29 (Ilkley) — £410,000 |
| Sheffield | 4.06× | S4 — £105,000 | S17 (Dore) — £426,000 |
| Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole | 3.17× | BH2 — £200,000 | BH3 — £635,000 |
| Middlesbrough | 3.13× | TS1 — £74,000 | TS7 — £231,375 |
| Leeds | 2.73× | LS11 (Beeston) — £155,500 | LS22 (Wetherby) — £425,000 |
| Birmingham | 2.72× | B6 — £162,000 | B74 (Sutton Coldfield) — £441,000 |
| Solihull | 2.68× | B37 — £209,000 | B93 (Knowle & Dorridge) — £559,500 |
| Manchester | 2.40× | M11 (Openshaw) — £175,000 | M21 (Chorlton) — £420,000 |
The pattern here is almost always the same: the local authority stretches out to absorb an affluent town or suburb that sits well outside the price range of its urban core. Bradford council reaches up Wharfedale to Ilkley — an LS-postcode spa town — where the 2025 median (£410,000) was more than four times BD1 in the city centre (£95,000). Sheffield extends to Dore and Totley on the Peak District fringe (S17, £426,000). Leeds takes in Wetherby, Birmingham reaches Sutton Coldfield, and neighbouring Solihull runs from Chelmsley Wood in the north (B37) to Knowle and Dorridge in the south (B93).
A caveat worth stating plainly
A wide spread is not a verdict on a city. In large part it reflects how the boundary is drawn, not how unequal the housing is. A council whose borders follow the edge of the built-up area — Southampton, Portsmouth — will look flat almost by definition. One that also administers a market town, a stretch of coast or a slice of national-park fringe — Bradford, Sheffield, Bournemouth-Christchurch-Poole — will look wide, even where the everyday neighbourhoods in its core are priced much alike. It is a story about administrative geography as much as about bricks and mortar.
It is also distinct from within-district variation. This measure captures the gap between outcodes; the difference between the average and the typical sale inside a city — where a few prime streets pull the mean above the median — is a separate question, covered in our look at the gap between median and mean house prices.
What it means when you are comparing areas
For a buyer, the practical read-across is simple. In a flat city, your postcode is a modest lever on budget; the search is mostly about finding the right home. In a wide city, the outcode is one of the largest single factors in the price — the same money buys a very different property in Bradford's BD1 than in Ilkley, or in Sheffield's S4 than in Dore.
Either way, the headline "average house price" for a city can hide a lot. The more useful number is the one for the specific district you are looking at — and, beyond the price, the all-in monthly cost once mortgage, council tax and energy are added in. You can see that for any postcode using the Homecost postcode tool: try a flat-geography city like Southampton (SO14), then a wide-geography one like Bradford (BD2), and compare how far the number moves as you change district.
For the national picture of where prices sit lowest, see our guide to the cheapest postcode areas to buy in the UK, or browse more data pieces in market analysis.
Based on 111,391 HM Land Registry Price Paid transactions across 27 English local authorities in 2025 (retrieved 12 August 2026). Figures are recorded sale prices, not valuations or forecasts. This article is general information, not financial advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.