What should a UK property report cost?

Last updated: 2026-10-02

Quick answer

UK property-check prices split into three bands that do different jobs. Pre-offer consumer reports — a desk-based public-record screen bought directly by the buyer — typically run £10–£50; our Lite is £9.99 and our Complete is £24.99. Official conveyancing search packs, ordered by your solicitor after the offer is accepted, typically run £250–£450 plus VAT. A full RICS Home Survey, which is a physical inspection, typically runs £400–£1,500+. The three are not substitutes; a serious buyer uses all three, in that order.

Price band	What it is	Who buys it, and when
£0 (free)	Postcode-area tools (ours at /tools/ and many public sites)	Anyone exploring an area; not address-specific
£5–£15	Fully automated desk screen on one address	Low-cost first look; no human review of the output
£9.99–£24.99	Pre-offer, human-reviewed public-record screen on one address	Buyer, before making an offer — where HouseCheckup sits
£30–£80	Fuller consumer-market screens with narrative and extras	Buyer, before offer
£80–£200	Climate / flood specialist desk-based reports with longer-horizon modelling	Buyer or conveyancer in higher-risk locations
£250–£450+ VAT	Official conveyancing-search pack (LLC1, CON29, Drainage and Water, Environmental)	Your solicitor, after offer is accepted
£400–£1,500+	RICS Home Survey (Level 1 / 2 / 3) — physical inspection by a chartered surveyor	Buyer, after offer, before exchange

Our verdict

At the pre-offer stage the honest price for a human-reviewed address-level screen is £10–£50 for a one-off report. We sell Lite at £9.99 and Complete at £24.99, each as a one-off with no subscription, hand-reviewed and emailed within 24 hours, usually faster. Anything significantly cheaper than that is either covering a postcode area rather than one address or skipping the human-review step. Anything significantly more expensive is buying legal weight, physical inspection, or climate modelling — different products for different stages.

Pre-offer screen, hand-reviewed, delivered quickly

£24.99 Complete, one-off. No subscription. Human-reviewed public-record screen on the exact address, emailed within 24 hours, usually faster.

Try or search any UK postcode

£24.99 one-off · no subscription · Human-checked and emailed to you. See a sample report · Review report options and coverage

Why the cheap end is cheap

Most of the raw data behind a UK property report is free. HM Land Registry Price Paid, the Environment Agency's national flood map, Natural Resources Wales flood extents, SEPA mapping, the EPC register, police.uk crime data, the British Geological Survey's scanned geology, and planning.data.gov.uk designations are all open data. A £5 report runs the pipes, prints the output and emails it. The marginal cost of serving one more customer, once the pipes are built, is pennies. That is a legitimate thing to buy, but you are buying what the automation returned — nothing more.

What the £10–£50 band buys that the £5 band does not

A human. The reason human review earns its margin is that public data pipelines break constantly: a dataset moves URL, a field renames, an API deprecates, a council's PDF format changes, a postcode genuinely has no record and the automated output silently shows a false blank. A reviewer catches these at the output stage and either refreshes the fetch, flags the gap in writing, or escalates to a direct check. On a decision as large as a house purchase, the gap between "automated silence" and "a person wrote down what we could not confirm at this address" is the whole point.

What the £250–£450 band buys that we do not sell

Legal standing in the transaction. The official conveyancing searches are ordered by a regulated conveyancer, carry professional sign-off, and are the documents your lender relies on to release funds. A pre-offer report cannot provide that and does not pretend to; our comparison at report vs conveyancing searches spells this out. The £400 is paying for the legal apparatus and for the professional reliance, not for better maps.

What the £400–£1,500+ band buys

A physical inspection by a chartered surveyor. See report vs RICS survey for the full comparison. Short version: this is the only document that can tell you what is wrong with the building, as opposed to what is going on around it.

Done comparing prices? Screen the property.

£24.99 Complete. One-off, no subscription. Human-reviewed and emailed within 24 hours, usually faster.

Try or search any UK postcode

£24.99 one-off · no subscription · Human-checked and emailed to you. See a sample report · Review report options and coverage

Frequently asked questions

There is no single answer, because the thing being sold varies enormously between providers. A pre-offer consumer property report, bought directly by the buyer, typically sits in the £10–£50 range. A solicitor's conveyancing-search pack, bought by your conveyancer after offer, typically sits in the £250–£450 range plus VAT. A full RICS Home Survey ranges from £400 at the lightest level to well over £1,500 for Level 3. These are not substitutes for each other — they answer different questions at different stages.

Because the two documents are different stages of the process. Our £24.99 Complete is a pre-offer screen, bought by the buyer directly, with no legal standing in the transaction. Conveyancing searches are legal documents ordered by your solicitor after the offer is accepted, with professional sign-off and the lender's reliance behind them. The price difference is the cost of the legal apparatus — not a difference in data quality.

Not necessarily. The cost of running a desk-based report against free public sources is low — most of what we publish draws on HM Land Registry, the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, the British Geological Survey and the EPC register, which are free at point of use. What you are really paying for in a pre-offer report is the human review step: someone reading the output, catching the dataset that is wrong or missing at the address, and writing the finding in plain English. A £5 fully-automated screen will miss what a human-reviewed £25 report flags. Beyond that, more money mainly buys legal weight, not more data.

Several things, explicitly. You are not getting a legal document — only your conveyancer's searches have that status. You are not getting a physical inspection of the building — only a RICS Home Survey does. You are not getting a title register that names the registered owner — only HM Land Registry's £7 title register does. You are not getting a contaminated-land liability opinion — that comes from the Environmental Search in the conveyancing pack. A pre-offer report tells you what the public record says about the address, with the gaps named, so you can decide whether to proceed.

Expect roughly £250–£450 plus VAT for the standard pack: Local Authority Search (LLC1 + CON29), Drainage and Water Search, and Environmental Search. Fees vary significantly by local authority — our search-fee pages at /search-fees/ list the LLC1 and CON29 component for every English authority. Optional extras — a flood search, a CON29O planning questionnaire, a chancel repair indemnity — add further cost. This is a separate line in the conveyancing invoice, usually billed as a disbursement.

Indicative ranges: Level 1 from around £300, Level 2 commonly £400–£700, Level 3 commonly £600–£1,500+ for conventional homes and more for complex properties. The variation is driven by the surveyor, the property value, the location and the complexity of the building. Get two or three quotes and ask what is and is not included. See our guide at /surveys for the questions to ask before booking.