URemovals UK Moving Index: Where Britain Moved in 2025

More moves left London than arrived in 2025: for every 100 moves out of the capital, only 93 came in, based on 631 completed moves booked on the URemovals platform.

Updated July 2026. Covers completed moves from August 2022 to June 2026; city flows use the 2025 calendar year.

The squeeze behind the numbers

Britain is moving carefully. Average UK private rents rose 3.5% in the year to April 2026, reaching £1,381 a month, according to the ONS Price Index of Private Rents. Every move a renter makes now risks repricing their single biggest outgoing, so the moves people do make are shorter, smaller and more deliberate. That caution shows up clearly in our bookings: two thirds of moves cover 10 miles or less, and nearly half fit in a small or medium van.

The sales market has been whipsawed too. HMRC counted residential transactions up 53% year on year in April 2026, but only because the April 2025 stamp duty changes had pulled completions forward and hollowed out the comparison month. Underneath the noise, affordability is still stretched, and people increasingly improve their situation by moving a few streets, not a few counties.

And 2026 brought the biggest change to renting in a generation: the Renters' Rights Act abolished Section 21 "no fault" evictions on 1 May 2026 and converted fixed-term tenancies in England into rolling periodic ones. Tenants can now leave with two months' notice at any time of year. We expect that to slowly flatten the rigid late-summer moving peak you can see in our seasonality data below.

Key findings

• London recorded 227 outbound moves against 212 inbound in 2025, an in/out ratio of 0.93 (1.00 = equilibrium).
• 67% of all moves are local, 10 miles or less; the average booked distance is 21.3 miles.
• Jun is the busiest moving month (146 moves, 12% of the year), while Jan is the quietest (71).
• The average completed move cost £190 in 2025, up 7.3% on 2024 (£177).
• The most-booked van is the large van (37% of moves).
• The busiest inter-city corridor in the dataset is Brighton to London.

Which cities gained and lost movers in 2025?

The in/out ratio compares arrivals with departures: above 1.00 means a city attracted more moves than it lost. Cities are ranked by URank, our activity-weighted score, the same measure used on our live migration data pages.

*Fewer than 50 movements in 2025; treat the ratio as indicative. Cities with fewer than 10 movements are excluded entirely.

The London story: a slow leak, not an exodus

Our busiest city lost more movers than it gained in 2025: 227 moves out against 212 in. A ratio of 0.93 is a leak, not a flood, but it points the same way as the official picture: London has run a negative domestic migration balance for over a decade, with more residents leaving for the rest of the UK than arriving from it every year.

The rental market quietly agrees. London's private rent inflation was the lowest of any English region in the year to April 2026, at 2.0%, against 6.5% in the North East. When the most expensive city in the country posts the slowest rent growth while cheaper regions post the fastest, demand is moving down the cost curve, exactly the direction our booking flows lean.

When does Britain move?

Bookings climb through the summer and peak sharply in Jun, driven by tenancy turnovers and the student cycle, then fall away to a Jan low.

How Britain moves: short, local and getting dearer

Van choice tells the same story: the large van takes 37%, luton van takes 24%, small van takes 20% and medium van takes 19% of bookings. Larger vans lead, but nearly half of all moves fit in a small or medium van, consistent with the dominance of single-room and small-flat moves.

Put the habit data together and a picture emerges of a country trading houses for postcodes. The typical 2025 customer booked 2.8 hours of van time, moved about 21.3 miles and paid £190, 7.3% more than the year before. Moving costs are rising alongside rents, and households are responding the rational way: moving less far, with less stuff, more often within the same city. The classic life-stage leap, the family house move across the country, is what the housing market is currently rationing.

Looking ahead

Two forces pull against each other in 2026. The Renters' Rights Act has freed tenants in England from fixed terms, which should spread moves more evenly through the year and make it easier to leave a bad tenancy quickly. At the same time, every move into a new tenancy reprices the rent, which keeps the brake on. Our expectation, and it is an expectation, not a forecast: more small, local, midweek moves, a softer September spike, and continued slow leakage from the highest-cost postcodes towards the affordable edges of each region. We will publish the next edition of this index when the 2026 data year closes.

How this compares with official figures

This index measures completed, paid moves booked through one platform. It is not the same as ONS internal migration estimates, which count people changing address using administrative records and publish 12 to 18 months after the reference period. Treat our figures as a fast, directional signal from the removals market rather than a population census.

Download the city flows (CSV)