Asking Prices Rise 0.7%: What Autumn Sellers Must Know Now

By Lisa Hayes · 21 September 2026

Asking prices went up in September for the first time since May. The average new seller now wants £367,440, according to Rightmove's House Price Index published this morning, a rise of 0.7% or £2,441 on August. That's the good news, and it's real. The catch is that almost every other number in the same report moved the wrong way: buyer enquiries down 9% on last year, agreed sales down 9%, and the most homes competing for sale at any point in twelve years.

So what you're looking at is not an autumn recovery. It's sellers asking for more in a market where buyers can afford less. Those two things can't both hold for long, and if you're planning to sell between now and Christmas, the gap between them is the single thing that will decide how your sale goes.

• £367,440average asking price, September 2026
• +0.7%month-on-month (+£2,441)
• −0.8%versus September 2025
• 12-year highnumber of homes for sale
• −9%agreed sales, year-on-year
• 64 daysaverage time to find a buyer

What did Rightmove actually report in September 2026?

Let's take the headline apart properly, because the press coverage this morning has already flattened it into "house prices rise" and that isn't quite what happened.

Rightmove measures asking prices on newly listed homes — what sellers put on the board the day they come to market. It is not a record of what anybody paid. It's the earliest signal in the chain, which makes it genuinely useful, but it measures hope as much as it measures value. Sold prices from the Land Registry arrive months later and tell a different story.

With that in mind, here's what the September index says. The average new seller asking price rose 0.7% to £367,440. That's the first monthly increase since May, and it's stronger than the usual September bump: Rightmove notes the ten-year average for the month is 0.5%. Prices are still 0.8% below where they were in September 2025.

The activity figures underneath are where it gets interesting:

• Buyer enquiries: 9% lower than a year ago
• New listings: down 3% year-on-year
• Agreed sales: down 9% year-on-year
• Homes available for sale: the highest in twelve years
• Time to find a buyer: 64 days on average, then a further 150 days to complete

Colleen Babcock, property expert at Rightmove, was refreshingly blunt about it. September's rise, she said, "is a welcome sign of confidence after a particularly subdued summer, but it should be viewed as a modest recovery rather than a major turning point." She went on: "With a large crowd of sellers chasing a smaller number of buyers, realism on pricing or a high-quality finish are absolutely key to attracting a buyer and making a sale."

That's the index's own author telling you not to read too much into her own headline. Worth listening to.

Why did asking prices rise when demand fell?

Because asking prices and demand aren't the same market. They barely talk to each other.

September is the busiest listing month of the autumn. Families come back from holidays, kids go back to school, and a wave of homeowners who spent August thinking about it finally ring an agent. Those sellers are, on average, more confident and more committed than the trickle who list in mid-August. They also tend to be selling bigger, better homes, the family movers rather than the reluctant summer stragglers. Put more of those on the market and the average asking price goes up, even if not one buyer has got any richer.

There's also a straightforward compositional point. August's index, also from Rightmove, showed a 2.0% drop to £364,999, the largest August fall since 2018, driven by summer sellers cutting to catch the few buyers still around. September's £367,440 doesn't recover that. It claws back a third of it. Look at Rightmove's own monthly series and the shape is obvious:

Month	Average asking price	Change on previous month
May 2026	£378,304	—
June 2026	£376,191	−0.6%
July 2026	£372,359	−1.0%
August 2026	£364,999	−2.0%
September 2026	£367,440	+0.7%

Source: Rightmove House Price Index. The May figure was this year's peak.

Asking prices are £10,864 below where they stood in May. That's a 2.9% fall across four months, and one decent September doesn't undo it. If you were holding out for the market to come back to your spring valuation, this report is not the news you were waiting for.

The number that matters more than the price rise

Buried in the same Rightmove release is a line that will do more to shape your sale than the asking price index ever will: the average two-year fixed mortgage rate rose from 5.09% in August to 5.29% in September, on Rightmove's own daily tracker.

Twenty basis points in a month. That sounds trivial. It isn't, because it's the fifth or sixth such move this year and they compound.

Moneyfacts, which tracks the whole of the market rather than a lender panel, puts the picture more starkly. Its analysis published on 16 September found the average five-year fixed rate had climbed to 5.82% — the highest since 8 November 2023. Caitlyn Eastell, personal finance analyst at Moneyfactscompare.co.uk, described borrowers as facing "another unwelcome rate shock", noting that NatWest, Santander, HSBC and Lloyds had all raised rates for the second time since the start of September.

Eastell's comparison is the one that lands hardest. In September 2021 the average five-year fix was 2.63%. Somebody remortgaging today on the same term, on a £250,000 loan over 25 years, is looking at around £446 a month more. That's £5,300 a year gone, out of a household that was managing fine five years ago.

Rachel Springall, also at Moneyfacts, put numbers on the shorter-term damage. Since the start of March 2026 the average two-year fix has risen 0.89 percentage points, from 4.84% to 5.73%, about £131 a month, or £1,572 a year, on that same £250,000 loan.

Measure	Earlier in 2026	Mid-September 2026
Average two-year fixed rate (Moneyfacts)	4.84% (start of March)	5.73%
Average five-year fixed rate (Moneyfacts)	—	5.82% (highest since Nov 2023)
Moneyfacts Average New Mortgage Rate	4.90% (start of March)	5.68%
Average two-year fix (Rightmove tracker)	5.09% (August)	5.29% (September)

Sources: Moneyfactscompare.co.uk analysis, 16 September 2026; Rightmove House Price Index, September 2026.

Here's why this matters to you as a seller rather than as a borrower. Your buyer's offer is not really a decision about your house. It's a decision about what their lender will hand them and what the monthly payment does to their bank balance. Every time the average fix moves up a fifth of a point, a slice of the people who were going to view your home quietly stop looking, and the ones who remain can stretch to a little less than they could last month.

That's the mechanism by which a 12-year high in supply turns into price cuts. Not panic. Just arithmetic, buyer by buyer.

Didn't the Bank of England just hold rates?

It did, and it didn't help.

On 17 September the Monetary Policy Committee held Bank Rate at 3.75%. But the vote was 6–3, with three members wanting an immediate rise to 4%. A three-way split at the Bank is not a signal of stability. It's a signal that the next move is more likely up than down.

This is the bit that catches homeowners out every single time, so it's worth saying plainly: fixed mortgage rates are not set by Bank Rate. They're priced off swap rates, which move on what markets think Bank Rate will be doing in two and five years' time. Bank Rate can sit perfectly still while your buyer's mortgage quote climbs every fortnight, which is precisely what's been happening since the summer.

Springall at Moneyfacts noted that economists expect a 0.25 point rise in November, with speculation that four of the five policy decisions between February and July 2027 could bring further hikes, a cumulative 1.25 points that would take Bank Rate from 3.75% to 5.00% by the end of July 2027. Nobody should treat that as a forecast carved in stone; market expectations have been wrong in both directions this year. But it tells you which way the wind is currently blowing, and lenders price for the wind.

The next Bank Rate decision lands on 5 November.

Where you live matters more than the national average

If you take one thing from this month's index, make it this. Rightmove reports that 61% of homes listed for sale found a buyer — but that national figure hides a spread so wide it's almost two different countries.

• Scotland 91%
• North West 71%
• Great Britain 61%
• South East 56%
• London 42%

Proportion of listed homes that found a buyer, per Rightmove's September 2026 House Price Index.

In Scotland, more than nine in ten homes that come to market sell. In London, fewer than half do. A London seller and a Glasgow seller reading the same "asking prices rise 0.7%" headline this morning are being told something almost meaningless, because their actual odds of selling differ by a factor of more than two.

Babcock made the point herself: "Over 90% of homes that come to market for sale are selling in Scotland versus less than half in London, meaning those who want to sell will have to set their pricing according to local market conditions."

The reasons behind the split aren't mysterious. London prices are highest in absolute terms, so a given mortgage rate rise bites hardest there. Scotland's system, with offers over and a shorter legal process, tends to price closer to reality from the start. And southern England has had the most supply piled into it. Rightmove's August data showed London with its largest choice of homes for sale since 2010.

If you want to know what your own street is doing rather than what Great Britain is doing, our guide to UK house prices and regional market trends breaks it down by area, and it's worth ten minutes before you set an asking price.

Seven months from "For Sale" board to keys

Here's the figure almost nobody reports, and it's the one that changes plans.

Rightmove says the average home now takes 64 days to find a buyer, and then a further 150 days to complete. Add them up. That's 214 days — just over seven months from the day your listing goes live to the day you hand over the keys.

List today and, on average, you're completing in late April 2027.

Sit with that for a moment if you're selling for a reason with a deadline attached: a job move, a divorce, a probate deadline, a chain you're trying to hold together, a repossession hearing. Seven months is not a technicality. It's the difference between a plan working and a plan collapsing.

And 150 days of conveyancing is not 150 days of steady progress. It's weeks of nothing, punctuated by a survey, a search, an enquiry nobody answers, and a buyer whose mortgage offer expires before exchange. Which is exactly how sales die. If your buyer locked in a rate in, say, October and completion drifts into the spring, that offer may well need redoing at whatever rates look like then. In a rising-rate market, a re-offer is a renegotiation. Our guide on what to do when a buyer is dragging their feet covers how to spot the warning signs early enough to do something about them.

What this means if you're selling this autumn

Strip out the noise and the September index is telling sellers three things.

One: you are competing with more homes than at any time since 2014. Twelve-year-high supply is not an abstraction. It means that when a buyer searches your postcode and price bracket, there are more results than there have been in over a decade, and yours has to be one of the ones they click. Overpricing doesn't just cost you money later; it costs you the first three weeks of listing, which is when you get the most views you will ever get.

Two: the buyers who are out there are genuine but constrained. Enquiries are down 9%, so there are fewer of them. But they're the ones who've stayed in the market through a difficult year, they've done their sums, and most have a mortgage in principle. They're not tyre-kickers. They will, however, walk away from a price that doesn't work on their spreadsheet, and they have plenty of alternatives.

Three: the price you set in week one is the single biggest decision you'll make. Von Grundherr at Benham and Reeves put it well this morning: launch too high "and you risk wasting the strongest period of buyer interest, only to reduce later once the property has already started to look stale." Ian Harris, president of NAEA Propertymark, made the same point from a different angle. An asking price needs to reflect "what buyers are realistically able and willing to pay in that particular local market, rather than simply relying on what a property might have achieved in previous years."

Both of them are describing the same trap. You price at last year's number, you get no viewings, you cut in week six, and by then the portal has stamped a "reduced" flag on your listing and buyers assume something's wrong with the house. A stale listing sells for less than a correctly priced one. Reliably, measurably less. If yours has already been sitting a while, the strategic options for a house that won't sell are the right place to start.

Should you wait for the Budget on 28 October?

Short answer: probably not, and certainly not by default.

The Autumn Budget is due on 28 October, and property tax speculation has been running hot all year: council tax reform, a proportional property tax, a lower threshold for the high-value surcharge. Rightmove noted in its August report that Prime Minister Andy Burnham's statement that he would not be changing property tax in this Budget should help give buyers more certainty into the autumn.

Two reasons not to build your plans around it.

First, a Budget statement changes the rules from a date, but it doesn't change your buyer's mortgage affordability, and affordability is what's actually holding the market back. Even a genuinely helpful announcement wouldn't put money back in a buyer's monthly budget while five-year fixes sit near 5.8%.

Second, look at the timeline again. If you wait until 29 October to list, and you're an average seller, you're completing around late May 2027. You will have spent seven months finding out whether a tax change you couldn't control was worth waiting for, while carrying the property, paying the mortgage, and watching rates that most economists currently expect to rise rather than fall.

Waiting is a position, not a neutral act. It has a cost, and in this market the cost is compounding.

What should you actually do now?

Practical, in rough order of importance.

Get a realistic valuation, then treat it as a ceiling, not a floor. Get three agents in. Ignore the highest one. The highest valuation is frequently the agent who wants the instruction rather than the agent who's read the market. Ask each of them for their last five completed sales in your postcode and what those homes were originally listed at. The gap between list price and sold price in your area tells you more than any national index. Our guide to what your house is actually worth in 2026 goes through the method properly.

Price to the buyer's search filter, not to your number. Buyers search in bands: up to £350,000, up to £400,000. If your home is worth £355,000 and you list at £365,000, you've removed yourself from the £350,000 filter and you're now the cheapest, least impressive result in the next band up. Pricing just under a round number is not a gimmick. It's how portal search actually works, and in a 12-year-high supply market it decides whether you get seen at all.

Fix the presentation before you list, not after. Babcock's phrase was "realism on pricing or a high-quality finish". Those are the two ways to stand out and you need at least one. Decluttering, a tidy garden and decent photography are the cheapest return on investment available to you right now.

Work out what speed is worth to you. This is the bit most sellers never do properly. If your circumstances mean a seven-month timeline is genuinely a problem, then the open market may not be your best route regardless of the headline price. Cash house buyers and quick-sale services complete in weeks rather than months, but they buy at a discount — and the honest question is whether that discount is smaller than the cost of seven more months of mortgage payments, a chain collapse, or a price cut you'd have had to make anyway. We've set out what percentage of market value cash buyers actually pay in 2026 so you can do that maths with real numbers rather than a sales pitch.

There's no universally right answer there. There's only the right answer for your deadline and your equity.

What happens next?

Three things to watch between now and Christmas.

Swap rates. They drive fixed mortgage pricing, and they've been volatile since the summer. If they settle, lenders will start competing again fairly quickly, because the mortgage market is nothing if not competitive, and Rightmove's Matt Smith noted there remains "a good volume and range of mortgage products available". If they climb further, expect another round of repricing and another slice off buyer budgets.

The 5 November Bank Rate decision. Less important for fixed rates than most people assume, but hugely important for sentiment, and sentiment is what gets people to book a viewing.

Whether the supply glut clears or builds. A 12-year high in listings resolves one of two ways: either buyers absorb it over the autumn, or sellers start withdrawing and cutting in November when nothing's sold. The first would be a genuine floor. The second would mean a soft start to 2027. Rightmove's own 2026 forecast, revised in August, is for national average asking prices to end the year somewhere between 0% and −2%, which tells you the company publishing today's positive headline is not, itself, expecting a rally.

That is the honest read. September's rise is real, it's better than a fall, and if you're selling a well-presented home in the North West or Scotland at a sensible price, you're in a decent position. If you're in London, or you're holding out for spring's valuation, or you need to be out by March — the same report is telling you something much less comfortable, and it's telling you now rather than in February.

Either way, the worst thing you can do is guess. Before you commit to an agent, a price, or a seven-month timeline, it's worth seeing what the different routes would actually pay you and how fast. Compare offers side by side — open-market, quick-sale, and everything between — and make the decision on numbers rather than on a headline.