Evidence behind the map

Data sources & coverage

The map accounts for all 296 councils and 6,856 neighbourhoods in the pinned England inventory. An area is shown as unavailable when its inputs or boundaries cannot support a consistent estimate. This is a preview with incomplete coverage; no missing input is treated as zero.

England coverage

Most neighbourhood gaps come from unverified markers in VOA housing-stock counts. Other gaps reflect incompatible geography or invalid source boundaries. Barnsley and Sheffield have no compatible stock totals for their current boundaries; City of London's stock contains an unverified marker. Their council estimates remain unavailable.

These counts measure area-record coverage. They do not measure the number of households that benefit or provide an individual home's tax bill. Council estimates use independent council inputs and are never substituted for an unavailable neighbourhood.

Available neighbourhoods contain 11,312,860 of 25,750,060 dwellings in the rounded published stock totals (about 43.9%). This describes where estimates are supported, not how many households benefit.

The original five-council sample remains available for existing shared links. It contains 198 neighbourhoods, including 91 available and 107 unavailable estimates.

Official inputs

Median sale prices · Office for National Statistics

Neighbourhood prices and independent council prices, year ending September 2025, released 26 March 2026. All-property medians cover 1 October 2024–30 September 2025. The imported fields are sheets 1a and 2a, column DT.

Council Tax property stock · VOA / HMRC

Council Tax: stock of properties, 2025, CTSOP1.1, stock at 31 March 2025 in the May 2026 update. Band A–H counts supply the weights. Published rounding and source markers are retained. Property-type calculations remain deferred.

Annual Council Tax charge · MHCLG

Council Tax levels, England 2026–27, Table 10, Data_Billing column AL. This is the full authority-average Band D charge with local and major precepts for 1 April 2026–31 March 2027.

Boundaries and parent lookup · ONS

MSOA 2021 boundaries, BSC V3, LAD May 2025 boundaries, BSC V2, and the MSOA 2021 to LAD 2025 best-fit lookup, V3. Joins use official GSS codes. The MSOA polygons were converted from British National Grid to WGS84 and checked for topology and island preservation. Invalid source shapes are explicitly withheld.

Postcode lookup · ONS

ONS Postcode Directory, May 2025 V2, including the 17 June 2025 coordinate correction. The lookup preserves source country, current/terminated status, coordinates and geography assignments.

Purchase-tax rules · HMRC

Residential SDLT rates and first-time-buyer relief, effective 1 April 2025 and reviewed 26 September 2026. A separately versioned rule set supplies supported purchase scenarios; see the methodology for their limits.

The price period, stock date and tax year differ. They remain visible separately and do not imply a current valuation or a single common observation date.

Postcode coverage and privacy

The lookup contains 2,651,940 current and terminated postcode records across 3,039 outward-code files, excluding Northern Ireland. Its country and status fields distinguish unsupported or terminated postcodes from unknown records. BT inputs are outside the lookup; their existence is not checked. A match only establishes presence in the May 2025 edition; newer postcodes may be absent. Source coordinates can be approximate or unavailable.

731,066 of 1,489,907 current English postcodes in that edition lead to an available neighbourhood estimate (about 49.1%). Other matched postcodes show the relevant data limitation instead.

After the appropriate outward-code file is loaded, the full postcode is matched locally in the browser. A network failure is shown separately from an unknown postcode. Full-postcode sharing is an explicit choice; personal value and bill inputs are excluded from sharing by default. Static-host requests and shared URLs may be logged by the services handling them.

Attribution and reuse

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Price statistics are adapted by ONS from HM Land Registry data licensed under OGL v3.0. Council Tax stock data: VOA/HMRC, licensed under OGL v3.0. Council Tax charge data: MHCLG, licensed under OGL v3.0. Logos are excluded from these reuse permissions.

• MSOA boundaries: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021.
• LAD boundaries and postcode data: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
• Postcode data: Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2025.

See ONS geographical licensing guidance. Northern Ireland postcode data has separate LPS terms and is excluded from this website, including its downloadable data files. The map remains a preview with the coverage gaps described above; it is not an individual property valuation or tax bill.

Read the methodology or explore the England map.