Private rental prices development plan, UK: updated May 2026

• We believe that the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) is now a well-established, trusted and quality measure of private rental price inflation.

• We believe that the PIPR should no longer be “official statistics in development”; we will be working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Head of Profession for Statistics to change the PIPR’s status to “official statistics".

• This is the last of the series of updates to our Private rental prices development plan, addressing the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)'s requirements from their Spotlight on Quality Assessment: Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) report.

• We will separately present a comprehensive review of these actions to addressing the requirements to the OSR, for them to consider if each has been adequately met.

• We will continue to describe future developments of the PIPR within our Private rents and house prices bulletins and our wider Office for National Statistics (ONS) plan for economic statistics.

In March 2024, we launched our new Price index of Private Rents (PIPR) to address shortcomings with our previous measure, the Index of Private Housing Rental Prices (IPHRP). The PIPR initially only covered Great Britain but was extended to include Northern Ireland from March 2025.

Spotlight on quality assessment

We requested an initial quality-focused assessment of the PIPR by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) in 2024. The OSR outlined several requirements for us to address before considering PIPR for a full assessment as an accredited official statistic in their Spotlight on Quality Assessment: Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) report.

We published a series of updates describing how we have addressed these requirements, along with any further developments that were planned for the PIPR.

This article summarises the main actions taken against each of the 5 requirements. More details can be found in our previous development plan update articles.

Communicate planned improvements

This article is the last update in its current form. It summarises the main actions we have taken against each of the five requirements in the OSR report, and any outstanding actions. From now on, we will look to continually improve the quality of our published statistics where possible, in line with the wider Office for National Statistics (ONS) plan for economic statistics. We will report minor improvements to the PIPR in our monthly Private rent and house prices bulletin. We will report larger improvements to the PIPR in the wider ONS plan for economic statistics.

Statistical designation of PIPR

Based on our development work and the positive feedback received from users, we believe that the PIPR is now a well-established, trusted and quality measure of private rental price inflation.

We no longer consider the PIPR to be “official statistics in development”. We will be working with the ONS Head of Profession for Statistics to change the PIPR’s status to “official statistics". We will present the OSR with a comprehensive overview of the actions we have taken to address the requirements from the quality-focused assessment so they can consider if each requirement has been adequately met. We will request an OSR assessment of the PIPR as an accredited official statistic in due course.

We provided additional information relating to the types of data collected by each UK country's rent officer function, which are delivered to the ONS, in:

• our Price Index of Private Rents quality and methodology information (QMI)

• our Quality assurance of administrative data used in the PIPR methodology

• our monthly Private rent and house prices bulletins

This included providing additional information on the different types of data submissions (for example, "bulk" or "Tenancy Deposit Protection-informed" collection methods) and clarification on "agreed" and "advertised" rents data collections.

We launched an annual release of information on rents data volumes used within the PIPR. This dataset contains:

• data collection volumes by month, by property type, and by geography

• data volumes used in the PIPR regression model, by month, by local authority in England and Wales, and by broad rental market area in Scotland and Northern Ireland

We have no further planned developments in this area.

We have published additional technical information in our Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) quality and methodology information (QMI). We published previously redacted papers from the Technical Advisory Panel for Consumer Prices (APCP). We have also published our new Price Index of Private Rents detailed methodology article, which provides detailed technical information, including:

• the methods used in the PIPR

• the rationale behind important methodology decisions during the PIPR's development

• an explanation of the similarities and differences between the PIPR methodology and the methodology of its discontinued predecessor, the Index of Private Housing Rental Prices (IPHRP)

We have no further planned developments in this area.

We continue to actively engage with a full range of Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) users. User engagement helps us to understand how well the statistic is meeting user needs and what else we can do to support users' understanding of the private rental market. Responses to our user engagement provided the main evidence for us to evaluate PIPR's "official statistics in development" status, as set out in our previous development plan updates.

We published our PIPR engagement strategy, which clearly set out the objectives and planned activities that would support users of the PIPR, in the April 2025 edition of this article.

In June 2025, we held our first formal PIPR user engagement survey (DOCX, 206KB). This survey invited all users of the PIPR to provide feedback on our PIPR statistics. Responses highlighted a range of areas where our users were interested in additional analysis and detail. We have published a response to this survey and a summary in the October 2025 edition of this article.

We have continued to engage with users. We published our How we measure rental price inflation blog to help users understand the way price data are used in the calculation of PIPR. We also hosted a public webinar (archived on YouTube), aimed to provide non-technical users with an explanation of PIPR methods, and its strengths and limitations.

Our upcoming engagement with users includes:

• hosting inflation stakeholder briefing sessions at 11:30am on publication day, providing users with the opportunity to review and ask questions about the latest inflation estimates

• hosting an Inflation webinar series focussing on the technical aspects of PIPR methods, which will include a short session on the Statistics User Network to promote this forum for ongoing PIPR engagement

We will continue to engage with a wide range of PIPR users and will ensure our engagement strategy remains up to date.

Much of the activity addressing this requirement also addresses the engagement strategy, as described in Section 5. This includes the evidence we gathered to evaluate the "official statistics in development" status of the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR).

We have provided a comprehensive response to the user requests received via the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) review and our wider user engagement in previous editions of this development plan. This is further supplemented by our response to the June 2025 PIPR user engagement survey.

In our opinion, feedback we have received suggests there is no element of the PIPR that needs further substantial development to meet the main user needs. However, our engagement has identified interest in additional rental market analysis beyond the PIPR's scope. 

We now intend to move into a "continuous improvement" phase for the PIPR, which aligns with the wider plan for Office for National Statistics (ONS) economic statistics. We will continue to describe future improvements to our rent statistics in our Private rent and house prices bulletins and the wider ONS plan for economic statistics.

We presented several materials to the Advisory Panels on Consumer Prices (APCP) during our private rental price statistics transformation work. Most materials relating to the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR)'s development were redacted from publication at the time because of market sensitivity of the ongoing development work and its link to consumer price inflation statistics.

The publication status of these historical materials was reassessed and the APCP Technical Panel agreed with our recommendation that these materials should now be published. Previously redacted APCP Technical Panel materials were published on the UK Statistics Authority's website in March 2025.

We are now committed to regularly reviewing and publishing unredacted APCP papers on a more frequent basis.

In the Code of Practice for Statistics, "official statistics in development" is a temporary label used to indicate where new or existing official statistics are being developed and tested with users. Following an evaluation, the "official statistics in development" label can be removed by the statistics producer.

Since its launch in March 2024, the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) has been labelled "official statistics in development". We have published a series of updates describing how we have addressed requirements from the Office for Statistics Regulation's (OSR) Spotlight on Quality Assessment: Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR) report.

Our engagement has shown that the PIPR is meeting user needs, is well established, and that our activities have had a positive impact on increasing user understanding of the methods used in the PIPR.

We believe that the PIPR should no longer be “official statistics in development”. We will be working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Head of Profession for Statistics to change the PIPR’s status to “official statistics”.

In line with the wider Office for National Statistics plan for economic statistics, we will strive to continually improve the quality of PIPR. For example, we will assess potential new data sources and will produce supplementary measures, such as county-level breakdowns. We are also developing a new product to meet the user interest in median and quartile private rental prices, separate from the PIPR.

We will discuss evidence of how we have met each requirement with the OSR so they can consider whether they have been adequately met. This will also guide the decision about when we will request a follow-up assessment of PIPR as an accredited official statistic.