Why a completed sale is missing from Land Registry data

If you completed on a home and cannot find the sold price, that does not usually mean anything has gone wrong with your purchase. Completion happens first. Your conveyancer then applies to update the register, HM Land Registry processes the application, and the sale must reach its public Price Paid Data before HouseMetric can display it.

Our analysis found that one month after the sale month, the typical Price Paid file contained only 14.0% of the sales that would eventually be recorded. It contained about half after four months, 90.9% after 15 months and 97.8% after 18 months.

So the practical answer is: check again after later monthly updates. A wait of several months is normal in the data, and some sales take much longer.

What happens after completion

Legal completion and registration are different events. On completion day the money changes hands and the buyer can normally collect the keys. The public sold-price record comes later.

HM Land Registry says the gap between a sale and registration typically ranges from two weeks to two months, but occasionally takes longer. There are two main stages:

1. The buyer's conveyancer must submit the application. HM Land Registry says this can be several weeks after completion. A priority search normally protects the buyer's application for 30 working days while it is lodged.
2. HM Land Registry must process the application. It says routine updates following a sale or new mortgage are processed on average within seven working days. Applications that create a new register, including many new-build transactions, take longer; its published quality information reports an average of 58 working days.

Those timings describe the registration process. Our figures below measure a broader question that matters to a user: how much of a completed sale month had appeared in successive public Price Paid files?

The short answer from the data

These figures come from 25 Price Paid files saved between 6 January 2024 and 9 April 2026. They stay fixed at that last file; a newer HouseMetric update does not change this article.

What the chart measures

For each sale month, the count in an earlier file is divided by the count of that same sale month in the file imported on 9 April 2026. A month is included only when that April file is at least 18 months after it. If two imports fell in the same calendar month, the later count is used.

The black line is the median across those sale months. The grey lines are the lower and upper quartiles, so half of the months sit between them. The one-month result uses 7 sale months. The 18-month result uses 20. Older sales were already nearly complete in the first saved file, so they do not shape the early part of the curve.

The early result is consistent: the middle half of sale months was between 12.8% and 14.3% recorded after one month. The share then rises quickly until about six months and more slowly after that. At 24 months the median is 98.4%, so a small remainder is still absent two years later.

July 2024, month by month

July 2024 is one sale month inside that curve. The 9 April 2026 file contains 81,499 sales dated in July 2024. The shares below are of that April count.

A buyer who completed in July 2024 and looked the following month was more likely than not to find that the sale was still absent. By the end of October, 42.0% of the July sales in the April 2026 file had been recorded. A year after July, 93.6% had been recorded.

Why the newest months look low

HouseMetric loads a new Price Paid file about once a month. The file is current on the day it is loaded, and the newest sale months inside it are still filling up. That is why a chart of sales by month drops away at the right-hand side.

The curve in this article describes how sale months filled up in the files saved through 9 April 2026. A recent month that is only partly recorded, and a completed sale that cannot yet be found, are both consequences of the same reporting delay.

Some completed transactions will never appear

Price Paid Data is not a record of every change of ownership. HM Land Registry says it covers residential sales in England and Wales that were sold for value and lodged for registration.

Its published exclusions include:

• sales that have not yet been lodged for registration;
• gifts and other transfers that were not for value;
• discounted Right to Buy sales;
• transfers of a share between parties, such as some divorce transfers;
• transfers subject to an existing mortgage;
• compulsory purchases and transfers under a court order; and
• some deeds covering more than one property.

If your transaction falls into one of those groups, waiting for another monthly update may not make it appear.

What to do if your sale is missing

This is the share of a whole month, not a promise about one house. Sales are not recorded in a fixed order, so a particular completion can appear earlier or later than the median.

For a recent completion:

1. Check the HouseMetric data update date shown in the page footer.
2. Wait for later monthly updates. HouseMetric cannot display a transaction before Land Registry publishes it.
3. For a new build or a transaction creating a new title, allow for a longer registration process.

If a normal market-value sale is still absent much later, ask your conveyancer whether the registration application was lodged and completed. You can also buy a copy of the title register. The proprietorship section normally shows the registered owner and, if available, the price stated to have been paid. This can confirm that the registration and price are on the title even if the sale has not yet appeared in Price Paid Data.

If the title has been updated but the sold-price record is missing or wrong, use HM Land Registry's change a sales record form. You need the postcode and date of sale.

Land Registry also makes amendments and deletions in later releases. Once it publishes an added or corrected record, a subsequent HouseMetric monthly update will include it.