EPC floor-area data: the missing half of UK sold-price evidence
HM Land Registry tells you what every home in England and Wales sold for. It does not tell you how big those homes are — and without size, you can't compute £/sqft. The missing half lives in the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPC) register.
What the EPC register holds
Nearly every dwelling sold or let since 2008 has an EPC, and each certificate records the property's total floor area (in m²), habitable room count, built form and address. It's open public data. Convert m² to sqft (×10.764), join a certificate to its sale, and every sold price becomes a £/sqft data point.
The join is the hard part
The two datasets write addresses differently ("12 Church Rd" vs "12 Church Road"; "Plot 47" vs "47 Skylark Rise"). Matching them requires address normalisation and fuzzy matching, with new-build addresses the weakest point (EPCs are often lodged before postal addresses are finalised). Done well, 90%+ of sales match to a verified floor area — Threshold's England & Wales join runs at about 94%, and unmatched sales are excluded rather than guessed.
Bedrooms: estimated, honestly
Neither dataset records bedrooms directly. The EPC's habitable room count lets you estimate them (rooms minus living space), which is why credible tools always flag bedroom counts as estimates. Any dataset that presents inferred bedrooms as fact should make you question what else is inferred.
Limits worth knowing
- Homes not sold or let since 2008 may have no EPC — mostly long-held stock.
- Floor areas are assessor-recorded; occasional errors exist, so outlier trimming matters.
- A certificate reflects the home at lodgement — a later extension may not appear until the next EPC.
None of these dent the central fact: EPC floor areas turn raw sold prices into the per-sqft evidence development appraisal runs on.
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Threshold turns 4.6 million official sold records into comparables, £/sqft ground-pricing maps, price prediction and a maximum land bid, from one pin. Free 7-day trial, no card.
Start free trial →Data referenced in Threshold is displayed under the Open Government Licence (HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, EPC Register, ONS, UK HPI). All figures produced by Threshold are statistical estimates for site appraisal, not RICS valuations.