Your home gained £5,000 this year. Your buyer can borrow £19,600 less.

Research by ValuQ: we set the price gain of every English local authority district over the year to June 2026 against the fall in what a buyer with a 10% deposit could borrow on the same home, using the Bank of England's own quoted mortgage rates for January and July 2026.

This is the ValuQ Property Watch, our weekly look at the numbers underneath the headlines.

On 19 August 2026, HM Land Registry published the June figures for the UK House Price Index. They showed the average English home at £293,262, up 1.8% over twelve months.

On 1 September the Bank of England published its July quoted mortgage rates. Read together, those two releases say something the headlines have missed.

What has actually changed for the average homeowner?

Two numbers move the price your home finally sells for. One is what homes like yours have been selling for. The other is what the person standing in your hallway can borrow.

The first went up a little this year. The second went down a lot.

Borrowing power is the size of the loan a buyer can support at a given monthly payment. When the rate rises and the payment stays the same, the loan shrinks.

Between January and July 2026 the Bank of England's quoted rate for a two year fixed mortgage at 90% loan to value went from 4.36% to 5.07%. On a 25 year repayment term, that takes 6.92% off the loan a buyer can carry for the same money each month.

How much did a home have to gain this year just to stand still?

About 7.2%. That is the growth rate at which a district's price gain exactly cancels the drop in what its buyers can borrow. Below it, the home is worth more on paper and less to the person buying it.

Twenty-nine of England's 295 districts cleared that bar. All of them sit in the North, the Midlands or the cheaper edges of the East and South West.

Derbyshire Dales came out furthest ahead at plus £13,355, then Northumberland at plus £9,594, Trafford at plus £8,520 and Preston at plus £8,141. Liverpool and Blackpool scraped over the line by about £30.

The other 266 districts did not clear it. The deepest holes are in prime London, where Westminster is minus £348,029 and Kensington and Chelsea minus £299,141, but the pattern runs far beyond the capital.

Why did mortgage rates rise when the Bank Rate did not?

The Bank Rate is the rate the Bank of England charges banks. It has been 3.75% since December 2025 and has not moved since.

Fixed mortgage rates are priced off what markets expect rates to do over the next few years, not off today's Bank Rate, so they can climb while the Bank sits still. That is what happened this spring.

The quoted two year fix at 90% loan to value went from 4.36% in January to a peak of 5.46% in April, then eased back to 5.07% by July. Moneyfacts put the average two year fixed deal across all deposit sizes at 5.59% on 1 September.

For a buyer borrowing £264,000, the England average at 90% loan to value, that is £108 more a month than in January for the same house.

What does this mean if you are selling?

• The index is not your price. It describes what has already sold. What sets your price is the size of the cheque your buyer's lender will write, and that number is smaller than it was in January.
• Expect more offers below asking, and expect them from buyers who are not trying it on. Many of them genuinely cannot reach the number they could have reached in the spring.
• Pricing to the market as it is now beats pricing to last year's comparables. Homes that start too high in a market like this end up selling for less after two reductions than they would have at the right number on day one.
• Get more than one valuation before you set the figure. Agents read the local buyer pool differently, and in a market that has moved this fast the spread between their views tells you something useful.
• If your district is one of the 29 that stayed ahead, you are in an unusual position. Say so to your agent and price with confidence rather than fear.

What does it mean if you are buying?

• Your budget is not what it was in January. Get a fresh decision in principle before you view anything, so you are not making offers against a number that has expired.
• Sellers in the South East and the East of England are competing for a shrinking pool of buyers. That is where your negotiating position is strongest.
• A larger deposit does more work than it used to. Moving from a 10% deposit to a 15% one lands you in a cheaper rate band and lifts what you can borrow at the same monthly cost.

Owners are reading headlines about prices holding up and assuming their own position has not changed. The number that decides what your home sells for is not the index. It is what the person standing in your hallway can borrow, and that number has moved a long way since January. Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ.

How we did this

ValuQ took the average price and the 12 month change for all 295 English local authority districts from the HM Land Registry UK House Price Index for June 2026, published on 19 August 2026. We then took the Bank of England's quoted rate for a two year fixed mortgage at 90% loan to value, 4.36% in January 2026 and 5.07% in July 2026, and calculated the loan a buyer could support at each rate on a 25 year repayment term at an unchanged monthly payment. That loan capacity falls by 6.92%.

Borrowing power lost is 90% of the district's current average price multiplied by 6.92%, which is what a buyer with a 10% deposit gives up. Value gained is the district's current average price minus the same average twelve months earlier. Net position is the value gained less the borrowing power lost.

The calculation holds the buyer's monthly payment and deposit percentage constant, so it isolates the effect of the rate move. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, and Bank of England statistical data.

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