How these figures are produced

The rent index measures what has happened to rents across an area. It does not measure what has happened to your rent, and it cannot say whether the amount your landlord has proposed is reasonable for your particular home.

ONS publishes no confidence interval and no per-property sample size for the rent index. We do not invent either. Where a figure rests on a small or unstated sample, we say so beside the figure rather than in a footnote.

Bedroom count and property type are published as separate breakdowns. There is no “two-bedroom flat” series, so when you ask for both we use one and tell you which.

Deflating rent growth by an inflation measure that itself contains rents is partly circular, so we prefer a measure that excludes them. ONS does not publish one, so we construct it from published components — the all-items index, the rents component, and that component’s expenditure weight — and chain-link the result. It is a close approximation, not an official series, and where we have had to fall back to headline CPI the page says so.

The earnings line uses ONS average weekly earnings. It is published a month or two behind rents, and the date used is always shown.

Decisions come from the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) register, published under the Open Government Licence. Party names are removed before anything is stored, and we never store the street address — only the postcode district and the property attributes the tribunal relied on. Distances are shown as bands, because an exact distance from a known point is an address.

Decisions are read by a combination of pattern matching and a language model, and the two are compared. Where they disagree, or where confidence is low, the decision is held for review by a person and does not appear here.

Before 1 May 2026 the tribunal set the open market rent whatever the landlord had proposed, so some older decisions raised the rent. Since then it may confirm or reduce the proposed rent but not raise it. Every decision shown carries the regime it was decided under.

benchmark.material_floor_area_diff_pct15percent

Difference between a property floor area and the local median beyond which the level benchmark is adjusted rather than quoted flat.

confidence_level0.95probability

Confidence level for every interval we publish.

geography.widening_order["postcode_sector","postcode_district","lad","region","country"]ordered list

Order in which geography is widened when a cell has too few observations. Any widening is stated in the result.

min_cell_n20observations

Minimum number of underlying observations before any figure is returned. Below this the geography is widened, or we say there is not enough data.

staleness.cadence_multiple2multiple

A source is stale, and alerts, once time since last success exceeds this multiple of its expected cadence.

tribunal.max_distance_km10kilometres

Radius searched for comparable tribunal determinations before widening.

tribunal.min_confidence0.75probability

Extractions below this confidence are held in the review queue and excluded from public output.

validation.anomaly_mom_pct5percent

Any local authority series moving more than this month-on-month is held for manual review rather than auto-promoted. Catches units changes and rebasing.

validation.max_null_pct2percent

Maximum share of nulls permitted in a required field before promotion is refused.

validation.row_count_tolerance_pct30percent

A run whose staged row count differs from the previous successful run by more than this does not promote.

Energy Performance of Buildings register

Floor area, dwelling type, built form and condition ratings by address and UPRN. Fetched on demand per postcode; the full bulk download is 8.26GB and is not needed for the questions this product answers.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) residential property decisions

Published rent determinations. Party names are redacted at parse time; full street addresses are never stored.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Crown copyright. Source: HM Courts & Tribunals Service.

ONS Average Weekly Earnings

Monthly earnings series. "Rents up 22%, wages up 11%" is a stronger comparison than the inflation line.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. Release used: 18 August 2026.

ONS Consumer Prices Index

Monthly consumer price inflation, used to express rent change in real terms. Preference is a series excluding housing rents; where a series including rents is used, /methodology says so.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. Release used: 19 August 2026.

ONS Postcode Directory

Postcode to coordinates, local authority and LSOA. Maps a renter's postcode onto every other dataset's geography.

Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Release used: 1 May 2026.

ONS Price Index of Private Rents

Monthly rental price index by local authority, bedroom count and property type. Backbone of the headline change figure. Revises history, so vintaged.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. Release used: 19 August 2026.

ONS Price Index of Private Rents: data volumes

Monthly counts of rent observations behind PIPR, by local authority, and by region and property type. Supplies the sample size the suppression rule needs — PIPR itself publishes no per-cell n.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics. Release used: 25 March 2026.

This is a statistical tool. It is not legal advice, it is not a valuation of your home, and nothing here predicts what a tribunal would decide in your case. If you are deciding whether to challenge a rent increase, a housing adviser can tell you things this page cannot.