LiLeinster InsiderSubscribe
Methodology

How we compute these figures

Every number on this site is computed from official Irish data with the same open, deterministic pipeline. This page explains the sources, the adjustments we make and the limits you should know about before relying on a figure.

Property data to May 2026, from PPR, CSO and RTB.

Sources

The VAT adjustment on new builds

The Property Price Register lists new dwellings exclusive of VAT, so a new build looks about 12% cheaper on the register than what the buyer actually paid. Before computing any median or yield we multiply new-build prices by 1.135 to add back the 13.5% VAT. This brings our medians within a few percent of the official CSO county figures. Second-hand sales are used as listed.

The 12-month median window

A town's headline price is the median of all sales in the last 12 months, VAT-adjusted as above. We use the median rather than the mean because a handful of very expensive or very cheap sales would otherwise drag the figure around. The 12-month window is wide enough to smooth seasonal noise in small towns while staying current.

The 20-sale floor on price-change rankings

On Movers, any ranking based on price change (year-on-year or 3-year growth) only includes towns with at least 20 sales in the last year. In a town with a handful of transactions, one estate launch or one large farmhouse sale can swing the median wildly, so thin markets are excluded from change rankings. Level metrics such as yield and affordability have no floor, and every town still gets its own page.

The 2% rent cap on the rent review tool

The rent review tool applies the national rent control introduced by the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2025, in force from 1 March 2026: rent increases are capped at 2% per annum or CPI, whichever is lower, applied pro-rata to the time since the last review. The tool is informational, not legal advice; the RTB is the authority on your tenancy.

Update cadence

The property dataset behind all 206 town pages and data tables is rebuilt from the latest PPR, CSO and RTB releases. Each data page shows the month the underlying data covers, so you always know how current a figure is.

Schools explorer

The schools explorer uses the Department of Education's "Data on Individual Schools" dataset (data.gov.ie, CC BY 4.0): 1,181 Leinster schools keyed to the nearest tracked town within the county. County and town figures therefore cover schools near tracked towns, not an exhaustive county census. DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) is the Department's own designation for schools serving communities at risk of educational disadvantage; the DEIS share shown is a bare percentage of DEIS-designated schools in the dataset, with no ranking, catchment, or feeder-school claims: those fields are not in the source dataset and are not fabricated here.

Best-connected towns and the connectivity score

The best-connected towns ranking uses the Transport for Ireland (NTA) GTFS_All feed (CC-BY 4.0): each GTFS stop is keyed to the nearest tracked town within 6 km, walked stop → trip → route to get distinct operator and route counts per town. Rail station distance is the straight-line (haversine) distance to the nearest of 171 stations on the same feed. Employment hub distance is the straight-line distance to the nearest of 12 curated Leinster employment hubs (the same list Find your town uses, so the two tools never disagree). A town with no GTFS stop within 6 km shows "no GTFS stop within 6 km" rather than a fabricated zero.

The connectivity score is: (route count × 2) + (20 if served by Luas, else 0) + max(0, 20 minus the nearest rail distance in km, rounded) + max(0, 20 minus the nearest hub distance in km divided by 2, rounded). The weights are a simple, published choice, not a statistically fitted model; Bryan may retune them.

Three places are currently excluded from the ranking: Dublin 6W (a postal district with no meaningful town centre point) and Citywest and Rush, whose recorded coordinates in our town dataset are under review. They return once corrected coordinates land, rather than ranking on data we know is wrong.

Planning pipeline

The planning pipeline uses the Irish Planning Applications dataset (DHLGH ArcGIS FeatureServer, CC-BY 4.0): granted applications only, over the trailing 12 months, keyed to the nearest tracked town within 7 km. County figures aggregate only the towns this site tracks, so the "per 1,000 households" supply-pressure figure is per 1,000 households in tracked towns, not the full county population; it will undercount true county household counts. The largest-approvals list is a curated selection of 25 large grants from the digest pipeline, not an exhaustive list of every large grant in Leinster. This dataset is refreshed manually by re-copying the source file, separately from the property data; the page shows the data's own as-of date.

Heritage: NIAH buildings and monuments

The heritage county pages curate two national datasets to Leinster. Buildings come from the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) Buildings Open Data, restricted to entries rated International or National: 527 of the 22,285 total recorded Leinster structures. Monuments come from the National Monuments Service's "Monuments to Visit" list, a curated 100-record national selection filtered to the 12 Leinster counties, with the dataset's own access caveat shown alongside every entry. Per-county totals for context (NIAH structures recorded county-wide, Sites and Monuments Record entries) are rollup figures only; the underlying record-level data for those totals is not published on this site. Both datasets are data.gov.ie, CC BY 4.0 (Dept of Housing, Local Government and Heritage).

Licence and how to cite

Our compiled dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0. You are free to reuse it, including commercially, with attribution. Cite it as:

Source: Leinster Insider, leinsterinsider.ie/methodology

The full dataset is free to download on the open data page as CSV or JSON.