HM Land Registry API: Price Paid, Ownership and Leases

HM Land Registry publishes every residential sale for value in England and Wales since January 1995, free, under the Open Government Licence. That is more than 30 million records. What it does not publish is a single API that returns them. Price Paid Data is a set of CSV downloads, the ownership datasets each have their own licence, and the machine-to-machine service HMLR does run is built for conveyancers, not for analysts.

So a search for a "Land Registry API" usually ends in one of three places: a download page, a licence form, or a gateway you are not eligible to use. None of that makes the data less valuable. It means the work of turning it into something you can query falls on you.

This article sets out which HM Land Registry data you can get, how, under what terms, and what you have to build before a single API call returns a useful answer.

Is there a Land Registry API?

Partly. HM Land Registry offers API access for some datasets and not others. The table summarises the datasets most property teams ask about, as listed on HMLR's Use land and property data service in October 2026.

The pattern is consistent. The open datasets are downloads. The datasets with an API sit behind an account and a licence that you must read before you build anything on top of them.

"HM Land Registry publishes the facts. Turning them into answers about a specific property is work it leaves to you."

What does Price Paid Data include, and what does it leave out?

Price Paid Data includes residential property sales in England and Wales that are sold for value and lodged for registration. Each record carries the price, the date of transfer, the postcode, the property type, whether it was new build, the tenure and the address in parts (house number or name, flat, street, locality, town, district, county).

It leaves out more than many users expect:

• Non-value transfers. Gifts, transfers on divorce, court orders and compulsory purchases are excluded.
• Some sale types. Right to buy discount sales, transfers subject to an existing mortgage and leases of seven years or less are not included.
• Recent months. Registration typically takes two weeks to two months, so HMLR notes that the latest two months of data are incomplete.
• A property identifier. The records carry an address and a transaction ID, not a UPRN. Joining a sale to anything else about the same home means matching on address text.

That last point matters most if you plan to combine Price Paid with energy certificates, planning or listing data. Our explainer on what a UPRN is and why property data breaks without one covers why address matching fails on exactly the properties you care about.

How do you get company and overseas ownership data?

Through the CCOD and OCOD datasets, which list registered titles in England and Wales owned by UK companies and by overseas companies. Both are free, but each requires an HMLR account and acceptance of its own licence, and both offer API access once you have one. Registered Leases works the same way, except the fee depends on which of three licence types fits your intended use.

Read those licences before you plan a product around the data. They are not the Open Government Licence, and what you may do with the data, including whether you may pass it on to your own customers, is set by their terms.

The data itself needs the same treatment as Price Paid. HMLR's own CCOD technical specification notes inconsistency in the way addresses and company names are supplied, so a company that owns forty homes may appear under several spellings and several address formats.

What is the HM Land Registry Business Gateway for?

Conveyancing, not data analysis. Business Gateway is HMLR's machine-to-machine interface for approved users, set out in its Notice 17, effective 16 August 2024. To use it you must be approved by HMLR, accept its conditions of use and pay fees by direct debit.

Through it, approved users can order copies of registers, title plans and documents, run index map searches by address or plan, make searches with priority and check day list information. Each request is a transaction on a single title, charged under the Land Registration Fee Order. It is the right tool for a conveyancing firm handling a purchase. It is not a way to pull ownership or sales data across an area.

What work does raw HM Land Registry data leave for you?

Enough that most teams underestimate it. If your question is regional (median prices in a district over ten years), the free CSV is sufficient and you should use it. If your question is about specific properties, five jobs sit between the download and the answer:

1. Reload every month. Price Paid is republished monthly, with corrections and deletions to earlier records, so a one-off download goes stale.
2. Match addresses to properties. Resolve each sale's address to a UPRN so it can join to other data. Expect a share of records not to match cleanly, particularly new builds and conversions.
3. Link titles to homes. CCOD, OCOD and lease records are held by title number. A title can cover several properties, and a property can sit under more than one title.
4. Normalise owners. Clean company names and join to Companies House so the same owner is counted once.
5. Join everything else. Energy certificates, planning applications and valuations each come from a different source with their own identifiers.

"A free dataset is not the same as free data. The cost moves from the licence to the engineering."

What does a property data API add on top of HM Land Registry data?

The matching, linking and joining above, done once and returned per property. The trade-off is that a provider cannot be ahead of its source: data appears after HMLR publishes it, never before. The comparison below sets HMLR's direct routes against a property data API built on the same sources.

A single property request looks like this. The values below are placeholders for illustration.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.propalt.ai/property/get-property?uprn=100000000000"

{
  "uprn": 100000000000,
  "address_text": "1 Example Street London AB1 2CD",
  "tenure": "Leasehold",
  "title_number_list": "AB123456",
  "property_type": "flat",
  "current_energy_rating": "C",
  "avm": 350000
}

For the sale history of the same property, the equivalent request is GET /market-activity/get-property-history?uprn=100000000000.

📌 KEY TAKEAWAY

There is no single Land Registry API. Price Paid Data and the UK House Price Index are free CSV and report downloads under the Open Government Licence. CCOD, OCOD and Registered Leases offer API access under their own licences, which you must read before building on them. Business Gateway serves approved conveyancing users one title at a time. If your question is about an area, download the CSV. If it is about specific properties, budget for monthly reloads, address matching, title linking and owner normalisation, or use a provider that has done that work. propalt.ai is built on the principle that HM Land Registry data should arrive already attached to the property it describes.

SOURCES & DATA REFERENCES

1. HM Land Registry. 'Use land and property data.' Dataset list with cost, licence, update frequency and API availability for Price Paid, CCOD, OCOD, Registered Leases, and INSPIRE. use-land-property-data.service.gov.uk
2. HM Land Registry. 'About the Price Paid Data.' Scope, exclusions, fields, January 1995 start date and registration lag. gov.uk/about-the-price-paid-data
3. HM Land Registry. 'Price Paid Data downloads.' Monthly and complete files. gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/price-paid-data-downloads
4. HM Land Registry (16 August 2024). 'Notice 17: HM Land Registry Business Gateway information services.' Eligibility, conditions of use and available services. gov.uk/government/publications/notices-under-the-land-registration-rules-2003
5. HM Land Registry. 'UK companies that own property in England and Wales: technical specification.' Inconsistency in supplied addresses and names. use-land-property-data.service.gov.uk/datasets/ccod/tech-spec
6. Propalt data team (October 2026). Price Paid Data matched to UPRN for around 97.5% of transactions; around 31.6 million Price Paid rows reloaded monthly.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

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