When you buy a home in England or Wales, you buy it one of two ways. Freehold means you own the property and the land it stands on, outright and forever. Leasehold means you own the right to live there for a fixed number of years, but the ground belongs to someone else, and you usually pay them for the privilege. We sorted almost 8 million sales by which kind they were, and the split, and where it falls, says a lot about how Britain really owns its homes.
What Leasehold Means
A leaseholder owns their home for the length of a lease, often a very long one, but the freeholder owns the building or the land underneath. Leaseholders typically pay ground rent and service charges, need permission for certain changes, and watch the value of their home tick down as the lease gets shorter. It is the normal arrangement for flats, where shared structures make a single freehold owner sensible. It becomes much more controversial when it is applied to ordinary houses.
Nearly a Quarter of Homes
Across all sales in our data, the national split is clear:
How homes are owned (England and Wales)
- Freehold around 77 percent of sales
- Leasehold around 23 percent of sales
So almost one home in four changes hands as leasehold. That single number hides an enormous difference between flats and houses, which is where the story really begins.
Flats and Houses Are Different Worlds
Break the figures down by property type and leasehold turns out to be almost entirely a flat phenomenon.
| Property type | Sold leasehold |
|---|---|
| Flat / maisonette | 98% |
| Terraced house | 9% |
| Semi-detached house | 7% |
| Detached house | 3% |
Practically every flat is leasehold, which makes sense: you cannot easily own the soil under a third-floor apartment. Houses are a different matter. Nationally only about 6 percent of houses are leasehold, and for most of the country owning a house means owning the freehold. But that national average hides a glaring regional exception.
The Leasehold House Belt
In one corner of the country, leasehold houses are not a rare quirk but the norm. Across a belt of old mill towns in Lancashire and Greater Manchester, the majority of houses sell leasehold.
| Outcode | Town | Houses sold leasehold |
|---|---|---|
| BB11 | Burnley | 75% |
| BL3 | Bolton | 75% |
| OL8 | Oldham | 74% |
| OL2 | Oldham (Royton) | 72% |
| BL2 | Bolton | 69% |
In Burnley and Bolton, three out of every four houses sold are leasehold, not freehold. This is partly a deep historical quirk of how land was developed in the cotton towns of the North West, where ground was leased rather than sold outright, and partly the legacy of more recent developers who sold new houses leasehold and kept the ground rent as an income stream. That second practice, selling brand-new family houses with escalating ground rents attached, became a national scandal and helped drive recent leasehold reform.
Why It Matters
Leasehold is not automatically a bad deal, but it is a different deal, and buyers do not always understand what they are taking on. A short lease can be expensive to extend and can make a home hard to sell or mortgage. Ground rents can rise. Service charges can be a shock. For flats it is largely unavoidable, but for houses it has rightly been questioned, and the law is slowly changing to make it easier to buy out the freehold. The first step, as always, is knowing which kind of home you are actually buying.
You can see the tenure mix of recent sales for any area with our house prices by postcode tool. Every figure here comes from the public HM Land Registry Price Paid record.