Where the numbers come from
Source. Office for National Statistics, Price Index of Private Rents, UK: monthly price statistics (Table 1), edition published 9:30am on 21 October 2026, covering September 2026. Background: the ONS Private rent and house prices bulletin and the PIPR quality and methodology information. The ONS labels these “official statistics in development”.
What “rent” means here. The average monthly rent across all private tenancies in the area — new lets and existing tenants — built by the ONS from Valuation Office Agency, Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Housing Executive administrative data. It is not an asking-price index, so it moves more slowly than portal or new-let figures.
The ranking. We rank 334 areas by the ONS's own “annual change” figure for all property types: 294 English local authorities, 22 Welsh local authorities and 18 Scottish broad rental market areas (the ONS does not publish Scotland by council). Northern Ireland's only local series (Belfast) has no figure for the latest months; NI country level: n/a a month, n/a — the ONS notes the latest two NI months are estimated.
£ figures. “£ a month more” is the ONS average rent this month minus the same month a year earlier. “£ a year” is that × 12. ONS rounds rents to the nearest £1, so the £ change and the % change can disagree slightly. Five-year change is our own calculation from the ONS rent levels.
Caveats. Not seasonally adjusted. Not adjusted for inflation or wages. Averages hide big differences within an area and between property types (see each area's “By home size” table). Scottish figures are mainly advertised new lets (ONS note 8). The ONS revises recent months; each page shows the edition it was built from.
Updates. Rebuilt from each new monthly ONS edition (next: 21 October 2026, 9:30am). The ingest checks the workbook's sheets and columns match the expected layout before anything changes, and keeps the previous edition if not.
Licence. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This site is independent and not endorsed by the ONS.
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