Quarterly release · July to September 2026
Leinster Sold-Price Index
What buyers actually paid, for every county in Leinster, every quarter. Built from the State's own register of sales and checked against the official index. The portals publish what sellers are asking; this publishes what the market settled at.
- Index level
- 284.8Q4 2013 = 100
- Quarter on quarter
- +2.8%
- Median sale price
- €449,8359,312 sales, +4.6% on the year
- Register to
- 2026-10-09Q4 2026 still filling
The series
How to read it
Three different things sit behind the chart, and they answer different questions.
- Year on year is the change in that index, with the CSO's own figure dashed beside it. This is the headline, the view the chart opens on, and the only series we check against the official index.
- Index is not a price. It is the market set to 100 in Q4 2013 and measured against itself since, so 285 means prices are about2.8 times that quarter. It climbs almost throughout because it starts at the bottom of the crash and Leinster has risen in most quarters since. For whether the market is speeding up or slowing down, the year-on-year tab is the one to read.
- Median price is what a middle-priced home actually cost that quarter, per county. It is the number people want, but it moves when the kind of property sold changes: a quarter heavy with new four-beds lifts it without any house getting dearer. The index exists because of that.
Checked against the official index
An index nobody can check is a press release. This one is validated against the CSO's own Residential Property Price Index on every build, using the CSO regions that make up Leinster weighted by our share of sales in each. The two use different data and different methods, so agreement is evidence rather than circularity.
Pass thresholds (r >= 0.85, mean absolute YoY difference <= 2.5pp) were fixed before the index was first computed and have not been changed. The full 2011-2026 series fails at 2.63pp, driven by quarters with 87-213 matched pairs before 2013Q4; the mean signed difference over that full period is +0.20pp, so the early error is noise rather than bias. The 500-pair floor that defines the published series was raised from 30 after seeing that result. Every floor from 200 to 1,200 passes, so the floor decides where the series starts, not whether it validates.
Where it is weakest, measured
Quarterly and annual movements pass. Cumulative growth over many years does not, and the size of the problem is published rather than the claim. From Q4 2013 to Q2 2026 this index rose 177.1% while the CSO composite rose 156.2%, so it runs 8.2% high over 12.5 years, about 0.63% a year. That is consistent with the known renovation bias of repeat-sales methods — a house that sells twice is likelier to have been improved in between, and the improvement reads as price growth — though it is not proven to be the only cause, because the CSO series used for the comparison cover houses only while this index covers all dwelling types. Either way: trust the quarterly and annual change here, treat long-run cumulative growth as an upper bound, and use the CSO for a decade-scale level.
By county
Every county's own page carries its prices in full, over a rolling twelve months, with the towns underneath it: Co. Carlow, Co. Dublin, Co. Kildare, Co. Kilkenny, Co. Laois, Co. Longford, Co. Louth, Co. Meath, Co. Offaly, Co. Westmeath, Co. Wexford, Co. Wicklow. The quarter-by-quarter figures behind this index are in the CSV, one column per county, and on each quarterly release page.
Take the data
The whole series, free, under CC BY 4.0 — no form, no email, no PDF. Cite it asLeinster Insider, leinsterinsider.ie/property-price-index.
Quarterly index + medians (CSV)Full dataset incl. validation (JSON)Methodology
How it is built
The index tracks the same houses over time. Where a property on the register has sold more than once, we compare the two prices and ask what changed between them. Do that across44,530 pairs of sales and you get a picture of the market that cannot be thrown off by which houses happened to come up for sale in a given quarter, which is the flaw in every median. The formal name is a repeat-sales index, the method is Bailey-Muth-Nourse least squares, and the code that builds it is in the open.
- 44,530 matched pairs across 12 Leinster counties, Q4 2013 onwards.
- New builds are VAT-adjusted. The register lists them exclusive of VAT, so every new-build price is multiplied by 1.135 before it counts.
- Block purchases are excluded. The register books an institutional buy of 189 apartments as a single sale; left in, those rows wreck the medians they land in.
- Pairs are filtered for a holding period of at least 365 days, an annualised change within 50%, and no more than 4 sales at one address. Dropped: 2,577 same_addr, 5,471 hold, 1,233 growth, 0 range.
- A quarter needs 500 matched pairs for an index point, which is why the index starts at Q4 2013 while the medians run from Q1 2010. The crash years are in the register but too thin in repeat sales to index honestly.
- The current quarter is provisional and excluded from the headline. Generated 2026-10-16 from the register to 2026-10-09.
Questions
- Are these asking prices or sold prices?
- Sold prices. Every figure comes from the Property Price Register, the State's record of what buyers actually paid, filed from stamp-duty returns. The quarterly reports from the property portals measure asking prices, which is what sellers hoped for. In the year to Q3 2026 this index rose 7.2%.
- How is the index different from a median price?
- A median moves when the kind of property sold changes, not only when prices change: one new estate completing can shift a county's median without any home becoming dearer. This index only ever compares a property with its own earlier sale, across 44,530 matched pairs, so a change in the mix of what sold cannot move it. Both series are published here, labelled, and never mixed.
- How do you know the index is right?
- It is checked against the Central Statistics Office's own Residential Property Price Index every time it is built, over 48 quarters from Q4 2014 to Q3 2026. The two are computed from different data by different methods and agree with a correlation of 0.921 and a mean difference of 1.77 percentage points on annual change. The pass thresholds were fixed before the index was first computed, and every result is published here, including where it falls short.
- What does Q4 2026 show?
- Nothing yet, and that is deliberate. Sales are filed with the register for weeks after they close, so a quarter in progress holds only part of its eventual sales. Q4 2026 is shaded and marked provisional, and is excluded from the headline and from the annual change. The newest settled quarter is Q3 2026.
Quarterly releases
Every settled quarter has its own page, so a figure you cite keeps working.