In August 2026, the Lloyds House Price Index recorded the first annual fall in UK house prices since November 2023. In the same month, the Nationwide House Price Index put annual growth at 1.6%.
Same country. Same month. Opposite directions.
Both figures are correctly calculated. They disagree because they’re counting different houses.
If you keep a net worth figure and your home sits on it, that’s a practical problem rather than a curiosity. You’ve got one house and two national numbers pointing opposite ways. This is about which one to reach for, and about whether that’s even the right question. It assumes you’ve already settled whether your home belongs in your net worth at all.
Two indices, two customer lists
The Nationwide and Lloyds indices are both built from mortgage data, and that’s the entire explanation.
Nationwide’s index comes from mortgages Nationwide approved. The Lloyds index comes from mortgages Lloyds approved. Each describes the houses that one lender agreed to lend against in one month, which means each is describing its own customers.
Lenders don’t have identical books. They differ in where they lend, who they lend to, what share of their business is first-time buyers rather than movers or remortgages, and which property types they see most of. Two lenders can look at the same month and honestly report different things about it, because the pool of houses each one is averaging is genuinely different.
And neither sees a buyer who doesn’t need a mortgage. Cash purchases are a real share of the UK market and they’re invisible to any index built from lending.
The Land Registry’s UK House Price Index exists to solve exactly that, by measuring completed and registered transactions across the whole market. It pays for that completeness in time, landing several weeks after the lender indices have already been reported on.
Every published house price number describes a sample of houses that doesn’t include yours.
Halifax is now Lloyds
From July 2026, the Halifax House Price Index became the Lloyds House Price Index. The method and the series carried over unchanged, so anyone who’s been tracking the Halifax figure in a spreadsheet since the 1980s has a continuous series under a new name.
Worth stating plainly, because much of the reference material hasn’t caught up: search for a comparison of the UK indices today and a lot of what comes back still says Halifax, still links to Halifax, and reads as though nothing happened.
The gap that matters isn’t between the indices
Set the two August figures side by side and the annual readings sit a couple of percentage points apart. That feels like a lot when you’re trying to pick one.
Now think about the range your own house could sit in. A house can sit several percent above or below its area’s average because of its condition, its orientation, whether the extension was done well, what sold on the street last spring, and whether a buyer happens to want that kitchen. The headline figures carry their own wrinkle too: the Lloyds average of £298,468 is a mean, and a long tail of expensive properties drags a mean upwards, so the typical house costs less than the average house.
One house in one street carries far more uncertainty than the distance between two national indices.
Which is why how to value your house for net worth turns out not to hinge on the choice of index. Any of them will track the broad direction of the market, which is all a national index is built to do.
Which leaves the question the indices can’t answer: what number do you actually write down?
What your mortgage lender does
Here’s a detail that reframes it.
If you’ve remortgaged recently at a comfortable loan-to-value, there’s a fair chance no surveyor came round. The lender valued the property from a desk using an automated valuation model (an AVM), and one of the firms selling that service to lenders is Rightmove.
Rightmove’s automated valuation model is a product sold to lenders, distinct from the instant estimate on the consumer site. Rightmove says it values “over 400,000 properties every month”, drawing on its own data alongside Land Registry and Registers of Scotland records, and that lenders use it “to support lending decisions when a surveyor’s valuation is not required”.
Which is a striking thing to set beside the standard advice on valuing a house: that online estimates are too rough to rely on and you want three agents through the door. The institution with actual money at risk, the one that loses if the house turns out to be worth less than it believed, is content in ordinary cases to lend against a computed figure.
Both positions are defensible, and the reason why is the useful part.
A number is only as good as the job it’s doing
A seller needs a price to within a few thousand pounds. That decision is made once, it’s public, and pitching it wrong costs either months on the market or money left on the table. Precision is worth paying a surveyor for.
A lender needs something different: reasonable confidence that the property clears a threshold. At 60% loan-to-value there’s a wide margin between the estimate and the point where the lender is exposed, so an approximate figure is enough, and sending a surveyor to every house would cost more than the extra accuracy is worth.
Rightmove’s product reflects that directly. “Each valuation is accompanied by a confidence score,” the company says, “which can be used to assess the suitability for use in lending decisions.” The lender receives a number and a statement of how far to trust it, and decides using both.
Tracking net worth is much closer to the lender’s job than the seller’s. You’re watching a figure move over years, where what matters is the direction and the rough magnitude.
That is also why recording which method produced the number matters more than the choice of method. A figure that runs consistently a little high still tracks direction correctly, the same way an AVM inside a known band is enough to lend against. A figure that changes source every quarter tells you nothing, because there’s no separating the market moving from the method changing.
Verdly publishes for education, not financial advice. Anything that turns on what your specific property is worth, such as a sale, a remortgage or an equity release, belongs in front of a regulated adviser or an RICS surveyor.
The deduction almost nobody makes
One more question, asked far less often than it deserves: is the number on your house line what the property is worth, or what you’d actually end up with?
They aren’t the same. Selling a house in the UK costs money before any of it reaches you: agent commission, conveyancing, an EPC, removals at the end of it. Whatever figure you carry, the amount that would land in your account is smaller.
Two approaches, answering different questions.
Gross market value treats the house the way a balance sheet treats any asset: what it would fetch, not what’s left after the cost of selling it. It’s how the ONS and the published wealth statistics handle property, so it’s the figure that compares cleanly against a national benchmark.
Value net of estimated selling costs answers what the house would contribute if it were converted into something spendable. It’s lower, and it won’t compare against published averages, but for anyone weighing a downsize it’s the more honest input.
What doesn’t work is answering one question with the other, setting a net figure against a national average that has no costs taken out of it.
The line you can’t know, and the ones you can
The house is usually the largest number on a net worth record, and the only one with no true value to look up. It is a well-informed guess with a national average leaning on it, sitting on a page where the mortgage balance is known to the penny.
That’s worth holding on to, because it changes what the figure is for. If the largest line is inherently fuzzy, chasing precision on it is effort spent in the wrong place. The signal isn’t whether the house moved 1.6% last month or slightly less than nothing. It’s whether the mortgage came down, whether the pension contributions went in, whether the savings survived the month.
Those lines you can know exactly. They’re also the ones you can do something about.
What makes them legible is keeping the history — watching the lines move across years rather than re-deriving a total from scratch every time you look, which is the thinking behind a net worth tracker for UK households. You can set up your own record and put the house line in at whatever figure you can defend.
It will be wrong. Every house line is. The rest of the page doesn’t have to be.
