Across the six West Midlands metropolitan boroughs, flats are dramatically less likely than houses to have an Energy Performance Certificate on record — and Birmingham sits at the extreme end of both measures at once. Just 20.9% of Birmingham's 47,055 flat addresses have ever had a certificate logged, against 76.2% of its 198,336 houses: the lowest flat coverage and the highest house coverage of any borough in the conurbation, in the same place.
An EPC certificate isn't a one-off quality check — it's generated when a home is sold, let, or newly built, and stays on file afterwards. A low coverage rate doesn't mean a property is hiding a poor rating; it means the home hasn't changed hands or been re-let recently enough to trigger one. That matters for anyone trying to read an area's EPC figures as an efficiency signal rather than a turnover one.
The six-borough coverage gap
| Borough | Flat coverage | House coverage | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Birmingham | 20.9% (9,844 of 47,055) | 76.2% (151,045 of 198,336) | 55.3pp |
| Solihull | 44.3% (4,427 of 9,998) | 73.7% (37,054 of 50,305) | 29.4pp |
| Walsall | 48.5% (2,777 of 5,724) | 75.3% (41,084 of 54,559) | 26.8pp |
| Dudley | 52.3% (3,278 of 6,266) | 72.9% (50,494 of 69,300) | 20.6pp |
| Sandwell | 62.3% (4,118 of 6,607) | 75.0% (46,036 of 61,362) | 12.7pp |
| Wolverhampton | 66.2% (3,611 of 5,455) | 75.8% (37,301 of 49,216) | 9.6pp |
Figures from Land Registry address records cross-referenced against EPC certificates ever lodged for that address, fetched 18 October 2026.
The pattern that stands out isn't the flat figures alone — it's how little the house figures move next to them. House coverage sits in a narrow 72.9%–76.2% band, a spread of just 3.3 percentage points across six boroughs with very different housing markets. Flat coverage, by contrast, spans 45.3 points, from Birmingham's 20.9% to Wolverhampton's 66.2%. Houses turn over and get re-let at broadly similar rates everywhere in the region; flats clearly don't.
A third conurbation, the same mirror effect
This is the third time this exact shape has shown up. A national ranking first flagged Manchester as a city where flats rank near the bottom of the country on EPC coverage while its houses rank near the top. A follow-up across Greater Manchester's ten boroughs confirmed Manchester itself was the most extreme case there too — lowest flat coverage (10.2%) and highest house coverage (78.5%) of the ten, simultaneously.
Birmingham now reproduces that mirror a second time, in a different region with a different housing stock: lowest flat coverage and highest house coverage in its own six-borough group. The scale differs — Birmingham's house-coverage band is even tighter than Greater Manchester's (3.3 points here against 6.6 there) — but the underlying pattern looks like a feature of large, flat-dense core cities generally, not a one-off Manchester quirk.
Price doesn't fully explain it
| Borough | 2025 flat median | Flat coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Solihull | £182,500 | 44.3% |
| Birmingham | £155,000 | 20.9% |
| Dudley | £127,500 | 52.3% |
| Walsall | £122,000 | 48.5% |
| Sandwell | £115,500 | 62.3% |
| Wolverhampton | £110,000 | 66.2% |
Across these six boroughs, flat coverage and flat price have a moderate negative relationship (Pearson r = −0.665 on these six data points) — cheaper flat markets tend to have better EPC coverage, consistent with higher turnover in lower-priced stock. But the relationship isn't clean: Solihull has the region's most expensive flats yet sits mid-table on coverage, not at the bottom. Birmingham, not Solihull, is the real outlier, which points back to the turnover explanation — a dense, high-rental-stock city centre — rather than price level on its own.
Council tax is unrelated to any of this: 2026-27 Band D bills across the six boroughs run from Dudley's £2,144.84 to Walsall's £2,627.48 (gov.uk), a gap that tracks local authority tax-setting decisions, not EPC coverage or flat/house mix.
What this means if you're buying a flat
A flat with no EPC on record in Birmingham, Solihull or Walsall isn't unusual — it just means the current owner hasn't needed to commission one. Sellers are legally required to provide a valid certificate before marketing a home, so one will exist by the time a sale completes; it simply may not show up in historical records yet. Buyers comparing a flat against a house in the same area should expect the flat to be the one more likely to have gaps in its EPC history, for reasons that have nothing to do with how efficient either property actually is.
This analysis draws on EPC and Land Registry records for 564,183 residential addresses across the six boroughs — part of the growing data set behind every Homecost guide. Try it on a specific address: search B16 8AE in Birmingham's Edgbaston/Ladywood flat market to see live sale history and EPC data side by side.
For the wider pattern across England and Wales, see the national EPC coverage ranking and cost intelligence guides covering stamp duty, council tax and the true cost of buying.