The Harlow
Market

Harlow's price did not move this year. Its volume did. The typical sale was £342,500, which is +0.7% on the twelve months before it, and the upper quartile moved −0.5%. What changed was how many homes changed hands — and a large part of that change is Land Registry still catching up rather than the market falling away.

HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

How to read this report

Sections 02 to 04 describe the town as a whole. Section 05 splits it by property type, and that is where most of the useful detail lives, because Harlow is a terrace market before it is anything else. Section 06 shows where the market is deep and where it thins. Sections 07 to 09 set Harlow against what it can honestly be compared with, and say plainly where a comparison is not available. Section 10 shows how far the four districts reach, which matters more here than it would in most towns. Section 11 lists what this report cannot tell you.

885 open-market sales registered across the four districts in the year, against 1,221 in the twelve months before. The median rose 0.7%. The upper quartile fell 0.5%. Both are close enough to nothing that the honest reading is a flat year on price.

Changes are our own arithmetic on the two columns beside them. The highest and lowest rows compare two single sales and move on which houses happened to trade; they are not a market movement. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

Read the median, not the mean

The median sale was £342,500. The mean was £375,476, about £32,976 higher. It would be convenient to blame that gap on a handful of very large sales, and it would be wrong. Take out the single biggest sale of the year, at £3,800,000, and the mean moves by £3,874.

The gap is a broad right skew, not a few outliers: 35.6% of all sales in the year sit above the mean. Harlow has a tight middle and a long, populated upper half. A town-wide average flatters the typical Harlow sale by roughly £32,976, which is why this report leads on the median everywhere.

Changes are our own arithmetic on the two columns beside them. Every figure in this table is drawn from a part period and will move as the remaining sales register. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

What the quarter does and does not show

The quarter's median of £337,000 sits −0.9% below the same quarter of 2025, and its upper quartile sits −5.6% below. On the face of it that is a softer top end. What it actually shows is which sales have reached the register so far: the lower quartile is almost unchanged at £295,000, so the cheaper half of the quarter has arrived and the dearer half has not.

What it does not show is that the market has turned. A part quarter of 137 sales, against 306 in the same quarter last year, cannot carry that conclusion, and this report does not draw it. The figure to watch is the full year in section 02, and even that carries the lag. Nothing in this section should be read as a decline.

A high-volume 2021, a long slide in transactions since, and a median that has drifted up slowly the whole way through. Volume is the larger story here, not price.

2026 is a part year to 28 September 2026 and is shown in italic. Its sales count in particular will rise as the remaining months register. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

On median, 2020 to 2025 reads £312,000 to £342,405, a rise of 9.7%. Across the whole series, 2019 to 2026 to date, the rise is 18.6%. Both are our own arithmetic on two figures from the table above, not a published index.

Harlow is a terrace market before it is anything else. Terraced houses are 47.3% of every sale in the town — nearly half — and flats and maisonettes are another 22.3%. Detached homes are only 15.4% of sales and set the top of the market. Any town-wide figure for Harlow is mostly a statement about terraces.

The change column compares the median with the previous twelve months, when detached £532,000 on 187 sales; semi-detached £415,000 on 197 sales; terraced £335,000 on 583 sales; flat £210,000 on 254 sales. It is our own arithmetic on those two medians. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

This report publishes a town median of £342,500. It should not be read without this page beside it. The four districts are different markets, and the gap between the dearest and the cheapest is £79,250, or 24.7%.

Median change compares each district with the same twelve months a year earlier and is our own arithmetic. Sales counts carry the registration lag described in section 03. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

Where the spread actually falls

The widest gap is CM17 against CM18: £400,000 against £320,750, a difference of £79,250, or 24.7%. CM17 against CM19 is narrower — £57,500, or 16.8%. If you came to this report expecting the east to west spread to be the headline, the east to south spread is wider.

The reason is in the type mix below rather than in the land. CM17 is 27.3% detached and 31.5% terraced. CM18 is 5.7% detached and 68.6% terraced. CM20 is 37.6% flats, the highest of the four, which also explains its lower quartile of £225,375 — the lowest of the four by a distance.

Shares and medians are by property type within each district, last twelve months. A dash means no sale of that type registered in that district in the window. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

Two in three Harlow sales land between £250,000 and £500,000. The market is deep in the middle and thin at both ends, which is the opposite shape to the towns around it.

Shares are our own arithmetic on the counts beside them against the 885 sales in the window. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

What the shape means for a guide price

Harlow has real depth from £250,000 to £500,000: 600 sales in the year, 67.8% of everything that traded (our own arithmetic on the two bands above). Price inside that range and you are in a market of hundreds of buyers and hundreds of comparables, where a guide price that is five per cent wrong will be corrected by the market within a fortnight.

Above £500,000 the market thins fast. The £500,000 to £750,000 band holds 95 sales, 10.7%. Above £750,000 there are 27 sales in a whole year, 3.1% of the market, and above £1,000,000 there are 12. A home priced above £750,000 in Harlow is competing in a market of tens rather than hundreds, and the evidence available to price it is correspondingly thin. That is not a reason to under-price it. It is a reason to expect a longer campaign and to treat any single comparable with suspicion.

At the other end, 163 sales — 18.4% — went below £250,000. That band is almost entirely flats; it is not a band of cheap houses.

27 homes sold at £750,000 or more across the four districts in the twelve months to 30 September 2026. That is 3.1% of all sales — about one in 32. This is a thin segment and this report reports it as one.

No change column is given on the segment table. With 27 sales in each year a percentage change on a median would move on which two houses happened to trade, and would read as a market movement when it is not one. The two columns are set side by side for comparison, not for arithmetic. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

Street and postcode only. House names are on the public record but are not printed here. Dates are registration dates, not completion dates. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Category A open-market sales only: repossessions, company transfers and other non-market sales are excluded. Downloaded 30 October 2026.

What a seller above £750,000 should take from this

27 sales in a year, 3.1% of the market, and 18 of them outside Harlow district. If you are selling a large house on a Harlow postcode, your buyer pool is not the Harlow market described in sections 02 to 06 — it is a separate, smaller market that happens to share a postal town. The comparable evidence for it is the table above and the 27 sales behind it, and that is the whole of it.

What this report cannot tell you is how long any of those took to sell, or what they were asking before they sold. Neither is in the record we are using. Section 11 lists that gap alongside the others.

Harlow's median of £342,500 sits against an Essex average of £359,433 and an England average of £293,525. The typical Harlow home is worth roughly 1.17 times the England figure and a little below the Essex one — which already tells you most of what you need to know about where Harlow sits.

UK HPI figures are mix-adjusted AVERAGE prices for August 2026. Ours is a raw MEDIAN of actual sales over twelve months. Different measure, different period. HM Land Registry UK House Price Index, August 2026 release, full file UK-HPI-full-file-2026-08.csv, last modified 21 October 2026, downloaded 30 October 2026.

Median against average

Ours is a median, the comparators are averages. A median is the middle sale of the set. An average is the arithmetic mean of all of them, and in a market with a long upper half it sits above the median. Harlow's own mean, £375,476, is about £32,976 above its own median.

So the ratios above are an order of magnitude, not precise multiples. Compared mean to mean, the gap between Harlow and England would be wider than 1.17 times, not narrower.

What the four districts actually cover

Every one of the 9,554 Land Registry transactions recorded in these four districts since January 2019 carries the post town HARLOW, so for this report the post town and the four postcode districts are the same area. They are not the same area as Harlow district council. 59 of the 885 sales in the last twelve months — 6.7% — fall outside the Harlow local authority altogether — our own arithmetic on those two counts.

• CM17 is the largest and reaches furthest east. It covers Old Harlow, Church Langley and Newhall, and then runs out into open country to Matching Green, Matching Tye, Hastingwood and Threshers Bush. 22 of its 330 sales last year were in Epping Forest district rather than Harlow. It is the dearest of the four, at a median of £400,000, and it contains 14 of the town's 27 sales above £750,000.
• CM18 is the only one of the four wholly inside Harlow district — every sale, every year. It is the most heavily terraced, at 68.6%, and the cheapest, at £320,750.
• CM19 runs west and takes in Roydon, again partly in Epping Forest district: 18 of its 151 sales last year. Median £342,500.
• CM20 covers the town centre and reaches north across the county line into Gilston and Eastwick, which are in East Hertfordshire and Hertfordshire: 19 of its 194 sales. It carries the highest flat share of the four at 37.6%, and the lowest lower quartile at £225,375.

Local authority counts across the whole 2019-to-2026 record: CM17 — Harlow 3,568, Epping Forest 189. CM18 — Harlow 2,022. CM19 — Harlow 1,342, Epping Forest 210. CM20 — Harlow 2,093, East Hertfordshire 122. Source: the HM Land Registry local authority district field carried on each sale.

Sources

1. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data Primary source. Complete annual bulk files pp-2019.csv to pp-2026.csv, filtered to postcode districts CM17, CM18, CM19 and CM20, category A sales only. 11,168 transactions in the four districts, 9,554 of them open market. The 2026 file carried a last-modified date of 28 October 2026. prod.publicdata.landregistry.gov.uk · fetched 30 October 2026
2. HM Land Registry UK House Price Index, August 2026 release Harlow district, Essex, East of England, England and United Kingdom averages and by-type averages in section 09. Full file UK-HPI-full-file-2026-08.csv, last modified 21 October 2026. publicdata.landregistry.gov.uk/market-trend-data/house-price-index-data/ · fetched 30 October 2026
3. Plumplot, Essex house prices per square metre The county square-foot and square-metre rates in section 07, derived from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. The equivalent Harlow page was requested and returned HTTP 404. plumplot.co.uk/Essex-house-prices-per-square-metre.html · fetched 30 October 2026
4. uk-postcode-polygons The postcode-district boundaries drawn in section 10, derived from Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open. No basemap tiles were used; the map is drawn from the polygons alone. github.com/missinglink/uk-postcode-polygons · fetched 30 October 2026
5. GOV.UK, Stamp Duty Land Tax residential property rates The stamp duty thresholds quoted in section 04. Quoted for context only; this report does not attribute the March 2025 registration spike to them. gov.uk/stamp-duty-land-tax/residential-property-rates · fetched 30 October 2026
6. Muvin, Meet the Team The names, roles and email addresses of the two authors, and the Muvin office telephone number and address. muvin.co.uk/about-us/meet-the-team/ · fetched 30 October 2026

Photographs

All photographs are of Harlow and are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under the licences named. Images were cropped and scaled only; nothing was generated, relit or composited.

1. Marigolds, High Street, Old Harlow, Essex.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMarigolds%2C_High_Street%2C_Old_Harlow%2C_Essex.jpg
2. Water Garden, Harlow Town Park, Essex.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWater_Garden%2C_Harlow_Town_Park%2C_Essex.jpg
3. Terraced houses in Churchfield, Harlow, Essex.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATerraced_houses_in_Churchfield%2C_Harlow%2C_Essex.jpg
4. Detached houses in Ladyshot, Harlow, Essex - May 2021.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADetached_houses_in_Ladyshot%2C_Harlow%2C_Essex_-_May_2021.jpg
5. Houses and flats in Springhills, Harlow, Essex.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHouses_and_flats_in_Springhills%2C_Harlow%2C_Essex.jpg
6. Roydon Lock - geograph.org.uk - 6095159.jpg — Robert Eva, CC BY-SA 2.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARoydon_Lock_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6095159.jpg
7. Detached House - 'White Shutters' - High Street, Old Harlow, Essex.jpg — Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADetached_House_-_%27White_Shutters%27_-_High_Street%2C_Old_Harlow%2C_Essex.jpg

All sources fetched 30 October 2026. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, and Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.