The C-or-above price spread is modest — and widest where margins are thinnest

Do higher-rated homes sell for more? Matching 8 million HM Land Registry sales to their EPC certificates, we observe a modest spread in England & Wales: homes at band C or above sell for 4.6% more per square metre than below-C homes. That is market context, not a causal valuation adjustment.

A +4.6% observed spread is meaningful context — on a £300,000 home, roughly £14,000 — but it is not the dramatic uplift sometimes claimed. Energy efficiency is one input into price among many, and location dominates. What is more interesting is where the spread concentrates.

The spread is largest where homes are cheapest

Intuition says the observed C-or-above spread should be biggest in affluent markets. The data says the opposite. The widest spreads per square metre show up in lower-value authorities — places like Hartlepool, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Middlesbrough and Blackburn with Darwen — where a small stock of efficient new-builds sits against a large base of older, below-C stock.

Where homes are cheap, efficient homes show a wider observed price-per-m² spread.

That has a clear implication for retrofit economics. In high-value areas the cost of reaching band C is a rounding error against the price, and the observed spread is thin — the case for upgrading is about compliance, not value. In lower-value areas the upgrade cost is a meaningful share of the home's worth, and the local matched-sale spread can matter more to the fix-versus-sell calculation.

Explore it by area

Switch the Retrofit Map to the C-or-above price spread layer to see the pattern across all 318 local authorities — the diverging scale makes the cheaper-market concentration obvious at a glance.

For a landlord weighing fix-versus-sell on a specific property, the local matched-sale spread is one of the inputs that can tip the decision — our portfolio exposure tool folds it into a per-property recommendation.