The green premium, measured: how much more an energy-efficient home really sells for, and the towns where the rule reverses

An A rated home sells for a median of £3,590 per square metre. A G rated home sells for £2,778. That is a raw gap of 29% between the top and the bottom of the scale. Pool the efficient bands (A to C) against the inefficient bands (D to G) and the national gap is about 11% per square metre.

Two things complicate that headline, and both push in directions you might not expect.

First, property type. Flats sell for more per square metre than houses, because a flat packs its floor area onto a smaller footprint in a denser location. Newer flats also skew toward the better bands. So part of the raw premium is really a flat-versus-house effect wearing an EPC badge.

Second, location. This is the big one. The most efficient homes are disproportionately new builds, and new builds are disproportionately found where land is cheaper. The least efficient homes include the period stock that fills the most expensive postcodes in the country. Compare a new estate on the edge of a cheap town with a Georgian terrace in central Bath and the EPC gap and the price gap point in opposite directions.

Controlling for both: the honest national number

To strip both effects out, we compared every home only against other homes of the same type in the same postcode district. We express each sale as an index where 100 is the local like-for-like median. A reading of 106 means the home sold 6% above comparable neighbours; 95 means it sold 5% below.

Controlled, the gradient holds but shrinks. A and B rated homes sell for 6% to 7% above the equivalent local home. C and D sit almost exactly on the local median. E and F sell a few percent below. Band G is the outlier, selling about 11% below comparable neighbours.

So the honest national green premium is not 1.7% and it is not 16%. For the typical home, moving from the middle of the scale to the top is worth a few percent. The real money is at the bottom: a band G rating is associated with a double-digit discount, even after location and type are accounted for.

Why the published figures disagree

With the controlled numbers in hand, the conflicting headlines make sense. Nationwide's 1.7% compares A or B against D, two bands that are close together, using a tightly controlled owner-occupier model. Our A and B index of about 106 against D at 99 implies a similar single-digit gap, so Nationwide is not wrong, it is just measuring the narrow middle of the scale.

Rightmove's larger figures measure the uplift a specific home captures when its owner drags it up from a poor rating, which is the full distance from band G to band C or better. That is the 88-to-99 jump in our index, a gap of more than 10%, before any value added by the renovation work itself. Halifax's "£40,000" is that same wide G-to-A spread expressed in pounds on an expensive home.

They are all describing parts of the same curve. The single number that resolves them is this: the premium is small in the middle of the EPC scale and large at the bottom. But even that hides the most interesting result in the data, which is geographic.

The green premium is a northern story

Split the country into regions and the average dissolves into two different markets. In the North and in Wales, energy efficiency commands a clear premium. In the South and East, it commands nothing, or less than nothing.

The North East leads at 22.3%. Wales follows at 20.5%. Every region above the Midlands shows a premium of at least 6%. Then the line crosses zero. London, the East, the South West and the South East all show a small discount, meaning their inefficient homes actually sell for marginally more per square metre than their efficient ones.

This mirrors the pattern we found in our five-year house price study, where the same northern markets led the country on price growth. The North is where the value signals in UK housing are now strongest, and energy efficiency is one of them.

The towns where efficiency pays most

Drop to town level and the northern premium sharpens. We required at least 120 efficient and 120 inefficient sales per town, which gives 129 qualifying towns. The 20 with the largest green premium are almost entirely post-industrial towns in the North and South Wales.

Hartlepool sits at the top at 62.3%. In a market this cheap, a small absolute difference in price per square metre becomes a large percentage. An efficient home in Hartlepool sells for a median of £1,925 per square metre against £1,186 for an inefficient one. The pattern repeats across Teesside, East Lancashire, South Yorkshire and the Welsh valleys. These are markets where a modern, efficient home is genuinely scarce and buyers pay up for it.

The towns where the rule reverses

At the other end sit towns where the least efficient homes sell for more. This is the most counterintuitive finding in the study, and it is concentrated in exactly the places you would expect once you see it.

Oxford, Cambridge and York are three of the most desirable property markets in the country, and in all three the least efficient homes sell for the most. The reason is the housing stock. The premium addresses in these cities are period and listed properties: Victorian villas, Georgian terraces, college-adjacent townhouses. They are hard to insulate, expensive to heat, and they sit at the top of the market on the strength of their location, their architecture and their scarcity.

The efficient stock in these towns is newer and sits further out, where land is cheaper. Buyers in Oxford are not paying a discount for a poor EPC. They are paying a large premium for a central period home, and the poor EPC comes attached. The energy rating is real, but it is swamped by everything else the buyer is paying for.

The same logic explains the negative regional numbers in London and the South East. These are the markets with the most expensive period stock and the most location-driven pricing. Where land and character dominate, the EPC barely registers.

The other half of the story: what inefficiency costs to live in

Sale price is only one side of an efficiency rating. The other is the running cost, and here the gap is not subtle. The same EPC records that carry the energy band also carry a modelled annual heating cost. Ranked by band, the cost of keeping a home warm rises steeply as efficiency falls.

A band G home is modelled to cost £2,892 a year to heat. A band C home costs £529. That is a difference of more than £2,300 every year, and it compounds for as long as the owner holds the property. Over a ten-year hold, the running-cost gap between a G and a C runs to more than £23,000 before any price difference is counted.

This reframes the green premium. In an expensive heritage market, a buyer may pay more for a beautiful, inefficient home and accept the heating bill as part of the deal. In a cost-sensitive market, the running cost is a live part of the negotiation, which is part of why efficient homes command a clearer premium in the North.

What this means if you are buying, selling or letting

For buyers, the EPC is a price signal that works differently depending on where you are looking. In the North and Wales, an efficient home costs more, and the premium is real. In Oxford, Cambridge, York and much of the South, an excellent EPC is not what you are paying for, and a poor one is not the bargain it looks like. Read the rating alongside the running cost, not as a proxy for value.

For sellers of an efficient home in the North, the rating is an asset worth marketing. A verified A or B sits 6% to 7% above comparable local homes, and the heating-cost difference is a concrete number you can put in front of a buyer.

For sellers of a period home in an expensive market, a poor EPC is not the liability it is sometimes presented as. The data shows these homes still command the top prices in their towns. The rating matters more for the eventual cost of compliance with any future minimum-standard rules than for today's sale price.

For landlords, the calculation is different again. Minimum energy efficiency standards already bite in the rented sector, and the direction of travel is toward a higher floor. A poor EPC on a rental is a future cost, regardless of what it does to the sale price today. Before buying any property to let, it is worth pulling its EPC history and the local energy-efficiency picture, because the upgrade cost is the part that does not show up in the asking price.

Whichever side of the deal you are on, the single most useful thing you can do is check the specific property. A Move Insights report pulls the full Land Registry sale history, the EPC, nearby planning applications, flood risk, crime and school data for any UK address into a single report for £29.

Methodology

Source data: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for sale prices, and the Energy Performance Certificate register for energy ratings and floor areas. Both cover England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland use different registers and are excluded.

Sample: We took every residential sale registered since 1 January 2023, a population of 2,431,540 transactions, and drew a systematic one-in-fourteen sample for a representative cross-section. Each sampled sale was matched to the property's most recent Energy Performance Certificate by postcode and primary address number or name. 156,960 sales matched, a match rate of 91.4%.

Metric: price per square metre, defined as the sale price divided by the EPC total floor area. Price per square metre is the standard way to compare homes of different sizes and removes most of the effect of a home simply being bigger.

Controls: two are applied for the national index. Property type, with houses and flats analysed separately, because flats carry a structural price-per-square-metre premium. Location, by expressing each sale relative to the median price per square metre of its own postcode district and property type. An index of 100 is the local like-for-like median. The regional and town figures use the simpler ratio of efficient (A to C) to inefficient (D to G) median price per square metre.

Filters applied:

• Floor area between 25 and 600 square metres
• Sale price between £30,000 and £3,000,000
• Price per square metre between £200 and £30,000, to remove data entry errors and non-arms-length transfers
• Where a property has more than one EPC, the most recent certificate is used

Statistical thresholds: regions require at least 30 matched sales in each of the efficient and inefficient groups. Towns require at least 120 in each group, which gives 129 qualifying towns. Below these thresholds the medians are not stable enough to publish.

Geography: town label from the Land Registry town field. Region inferred from postcode area via a fixed mapping covering the nine English regions and Wales.

All figures use medians, not means, because property price distributions are skewed and a small number of very high-value sales would distort an average.

Caveats and limitations

An EPC exists for a property only if it has been sold, let or built since 2008. That covers most of the market but not all of it, and the homes without a certificate are disproportionately long-held and older. Because we match certificates to sales, both sides of the analysis are already sale-driven, which reduces this bias but does not remove it entirely.

This is a cross-sectional comparison of homes at different ratings, not a measurement of the return on a specific upgrade. A home that moves from G to C may gain value, but this study cannot separate the value of the better rating from the value of the renovation work that produced it. Treat the premium as the market's pricing of efficiency, not as a guaranteed payback on a heat pump or new windows.

EPC floor area is assessor-measured or estimated and carries noise at the level of a single home. Across 156,960 matched sales that noise averages out, but any individual property may differ from its certificate.

In very low-value markets, percentage premiums can look dramatic because the denominator is small. Hartlepool's 62.3% reflects a real and large gap in price per square metre, but in absolute terms it is the difference between roughly £1,200 and £1,900 per square metre, far less in pounds than a single-digit premium in London.

Data and source

Built from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and the Energy Performance Certificate register for England and Wales. We refresh both datasets regularly. The figures in this analysis use sales registered from January 2023 and certificates lodged up to mid-2026.

For any UK address you can check the full Land Registry sale history, EPC rating, comparable nearby sales, planning applications, flood risk, crime, schools and broadband data on Move Insights from £29.