UKPP Rental Yield Index

Methodology

How this index is built, what it covers, and where it can mislead. Current as of the May 2026 edition.

Formula

gross yield % = (average monthly rent × 12) ÷ average house price × 100

Sources

Two inputs, both official, both free to check:

  • Rent — ONS (Price Index of Private Rents), as at 22 July 2026. Series onspipr:%s:rent_price (%s = the local authority). Check at source
  • Price — HM Land Registry (UK House Price Index), as at 1 July 2026. Series ukhpi:%s:avg_price. Check at source

Every figure on every edition traces to one of these two, with the date it was read. Nothing is modelled, estimated, interpolated, or filled in. Where an input is missing for an area, that area is excluded and named — never estimated.

Why the newest edition is not last month

Both sources publish in arrears, and they do not publish on the same schedule — HM Land Registry publishes a given month later than ONS does. An edition uses figures from the SAME month for both inputs, so it can only be computed once BOTH have published that month. The newest available edition is therefore set by the slower source, which is why the current edition (May 2026) is not last month. That is a publication schedule, not a gap in the data.

Coverage and exclusions

294 local authorities included, 0 excluded.

  • No local authority was excluded from this edition.

Excluded: none

Thin-volume flagging

An LA whose latest published monthly sales volume is below 50 is flagged thin.

HM Land Registry itself warns that local-authority House Price Index averages are based on monthly sales volumes that can be small, which makes month-to-month movements volatile for lower-volume areas. Local authorities flagged 'thin' below are those whose latest published monthly sales volume falls under this index's suppression threshold. Read a thin-flagged figure with caution, and do not compare it directly against high-volume areas as if the two were equally stable measurements.
Headline rankings (the highest and lowest tables) exclude local authorities flagged thin (low monthly sales volume); those areas appear in the full table below, flagged. A sort of the full table or CSV will therefore not reproduce the headline lists.

What this index is — and is not

The average rented property and the average sold property are not the same property. This index divides an aggregate rent series by an aggregate price series, so it measures the relative gross-yield attractiveness of an area — NOT an achievable return on any specific purchase.
This is a GROSS yield: rent over price, before any costs. It models no voids, management, maintenance, tax, or finance, and forecasts nothing. It is a measurement, not investment advice.

Revision policy

Each published edition is immutable at its own URL and is never edited after release. Both inputs (ONS PIPR rent, HM Land Registry HPI price) are themselves revised at source after first publication. Where a prior edition's underlying figure is later revised, that revision is not applied retroactively — it appears in the NEXT edition, which shows the prior value alongside the current one and flags it as revised. Prior editions are never silently overwritten.

Reproducibility

Every edition is computed by a pure function of its stored inputs: the same observations regenerate the same figures, byte for byte, on any machine and at any later date. Each published figure is stored alongside the identifiers of the two source observations it was derived from, so any individual number can be traced back to the exact rent and price readings that produced it, and the arithmetic re-run. If a figure here is ever disputed, it can be checked rather than argued about.

Retrospective editions

Retrospective editions are computed from the latest published data for each period — not the data as it stood at the time. ONS and HM Land Registry revise their figures, so a retrospective edition is not what would have been published then. Retrospective editions therefore carry no revision flags; revision tracking begins with the first live edition.

Citing this index

Free to use and free to cite, with attribution to the UK Property Portal Rental Yield Index and the edition date. Every edition publishes a CSV of the full ranked table.