Where to find your home's 1991 value — every free source

There's no official record of what your home was worth on 1 April 1991. What the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) asks for instead is sales of similar homes between 1 April 1989 and 31 March 1993 (between 1 April 2001 and 31 March 2005 for Wales). For England these are hard to find, because the Land Registry's free price records start in 1995. Newspaper archives and long-established estate agents are the places to try. If nothing turns up, the bands of similar homes nearby are the evidence most challenges rely on anyway.

Check your 1991 value now

The check's figure is an estimate built from recorded sales and regional house-price movement. It's useful for judging whether a challenge is worth making, but it isn't evidence in its own right (see below).

Sales in the valuation window

GOV.UK asks for the address, price and date of each sale, and the closer the sale is to the valuation date, the more useful it is. Your own home counts if it sold in the window. If you bought it then, the price will be on your completion statement or mortgage papers.

Where you look depends on where you live, because the free records don't reach back equally far:

Wales: the Land Registry covers the whole window

HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data covers every sale in England and Wales since January 1995, so for a Welsh home it covers the full 2001–2005 window. Search your street and the streets around it. A sale of a similar house in 2002, 2003 or 2004 is exactly what the VOA asks for.

England: archives and agents

For 1989–1993 you'll need sources from the time:

• Local newspapers. Their property pages from the early 1990s often list homes on your street. The British Newspaper Archive is a subscription, but many public libraries give free access, and some local studies libraries keep their own runs. These are usually asking prices. An asking price isn't a sale price, so label it as one.
• Estate agents that were trading then. Some keep old sale particulars. It costs nothing to ask.
• Your own papers, or a neighbour's, if either home was bought in the window.

For each sale you find, note the address, the date, the price, whether it's an asking price or a completed sale, and where it came from.

Later sales: context, not evidence

A sale from 1995 onwards is outside the window. You can adjust it back to 1991 with a house-price index (using sale prices shows how), and the result can tell you whether your band looks out of line. But the VOA says it doesn't use house-price indexes, and GOV.UK says house-price index information isn't strong evidence. Use one to decide whether to go ahead. If you include it in a challenge, label it as an estimate.

If you can't find a sale

For England, most people can't, and it isn't fatal. The evidence GOV.UK asks for first in a band review is the addresses of up to five similar homes in a lower band, and those are free to look up (how to find comparables). A sale from the window strengthens that case, but you don't need one to make it.

Turning a figure into a band

If you do find a valuation-date figure, check which band it falls in: England's thresholds are in bands explained, and Wales's 2003 thresholds are in the Wales guide.

What not to rely on

Online estimates, what you paid for the home recently, and the cost of work you've had done all describe today, not 1991 (what evidence counts).