OPEN DATAFREE TO CITE

The numbers behind the checks.

Every figure gemhome uses is built from public sources and live listings, then published rather than kept. Journalists, researchers and students are welcome to quote any of it free of charge with a credit and a link. If you want a whole dataset, a custom cut or a feed, that is a conversation worth having.

Room rent figures last rebuilt 2026-08-09. Source: Live OpenRent listings, rooms in shared properties.
NOT PUBLISHED ANYWHERE ELSE
Room rents in shared houses
3,683 rooms · 37 cities

Median monthly rent for a room in a shared house, with quartiles, the share of listings that include bills, and how many accept students. The official statistics cover whole properties, so a house share, the way most people under thirty actually rent, is missing from them. Currently Hull at £445 through to London at £927.

Browse room rents
313 LOCAL AUTHORITIES
Gross rental yields by area
313 areas

Gross yield by local authority, built from asking rents against sold prices, with the underlying medians shown so the arithmetic is checkable rather than asserted.

Browse yields
316 AREAS
Asking rents by area
316 areas

Median asking rent by area and bedroom count, with direction of travel over time. Built on the ONS Price Index of Private Rents and refreshed as new figures land.

Browse rents
LIVE PLANNING DATA
HMO licensing and Article 4
Point-in-polygon by postcode

Whether a postcode sits inside an Article 4 direction, checked against the national planning dataset, alongside the councils running selective and additional licensing schemes.

Check a postcode
Free, for anyone writing about it

Quote any figure on the site in an article, a paper or a video at no cost. All we ask is a credit to gemhome and a link to the page the number came from, so a reader can check it. The area pages carry machine-readable dataset metadata under CC BY 4.0.

Need a specific cut for a story, or the figures for one city broken out? Ask and we will usually just send it.

Licensed, for using it in a product

Building something that needs these numbers on a schedule rather than once? A licence covers the full dataset as CSV or JSON, refreshed on a cadence you pick, with the methodology documented so your own users can be told where it came from.

  • Full history, not just the current snapshot
  • Fields we do not publish, including sample sizes per area
  • Redistribution rights, which the free credit terms do not give you
Talk about a licence
How it is built
Room rents come from live listings for rooms in shared properties, taken as a median per city with cities under ten listings held back entirely rather than published thin. Rents and yields start from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents and Land Registry sold prices. Licensing comes from the national planning dataset and council registers. Nothing here is modelled or estimated: where we do not have enough to be sure, the page says so instead of filling the gap.