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Manchester’s median sold price in September 2026 was £257,000, and the register still has a third of the month to publish - what Land Registry Price Paid Data really tells you

England and Wales publish every residential sale as open data: HM Land Registry’s Price Paid Data, one row per completed transaction since 1995, with the price, the completion date, the property type, the tenure and the full address. It is the source behind most “sold prices” pages on property portals. It also has a public SPARQL endpoint that nobody seems to use, so on 8 November 2026 I pointed the new UK Sold House Prices Actor at it and read one month for one city.

Manchester, September 2026: 295 sales

By property type, the medians line up as you would expect, with one surprise in the volumes:

Terraced houses are the Manchester market: more than a third of all sales, at a median under £225,000. Flats are only one sale in six for a city centre full of towers, and half of all sales are leasehold, which is unusual for houses outside the north-west: Manchester’s terraces were largely built on long leases.

The number that changes the most: how many sales there were

The Land Registry registers a sale when the transfer of ownership is completed and filed, which happens weeks after the keys change hands. So the count for a month keeps growing after the month ends. For England and Wales, as read on 8 November 2026:

September is not a crash: it is a month that is about a third published. If you compare “this month” to “last month” from the register, you will always find a collapse. The Actor writes the publication delay into every summary row, and its monitor mode exists for this reason: run it weekly with a four-month window and it returns only the sales that were added since the last run, including the late ones.

The same lag explains why September shows zero new builds in Manchester: new-build completions reach the register later than resales.

Towns, districts and the trap between them

“Manchester” means two things in the data. The post town Manchester covers addresses in Salford, Trafford, Stockport or Tameside; the local authority district Manchester is the city council area. For September 2026 the post town has 295 sales, the district 130. The Actor tries the town first, then the district, then the county, and tells you which one matched, so that a comparison between two cities compares the same kind of thing.

What is not in the data

No floor area, so no price per square metre (the Energy Performance Certificate register has areas; joining them is the obvious next step). No asking prices, no time on market, no names of buyers or sellers. Scotland and Northern Ireland keep their own registers and are not covered.

Reproduce it

{ "locations": ["Manchester"], "dateFrom": "2026-09-01", "dateTo": "2026-09-30", "maxSalesPerLocation": 500 }

Terraced houses sold in the M1 to M9 postcode areas over the last six months:

{ "locations": ["M1", "M2", "M3", "M4", "M5", "M6", "M7", "M8", "M9"], "monthsBack": 6, "propertyTypes": ["terraced"] }

$0.50 per 1,000 sales, the first 20 of every run free, one free summary per location.

Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data via landregistry.data.gov.uk, read on 8 November 2026. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Counts are of transactions registered by that date; later registrations will raise them.