What is a UPRN?
A UPRN — Unique Property Reference Number — is the identifier assigned to every addressable location in Great Britain: houses, flats, offices, even bus shelters and electricity substations. It's a number up to 12 digits long, it never changes, and it is never reused. When street names change, houses are renamed, or two flats merge, the address changes — the UPRN doesn't.
Who assigns UPRNs?
Local authorities create a UPRN when a property first enters the planning process, and the record is maintained through GeoPlace and published by Ordnance Survey. Since 2020 the core identifiers have been open data (OS Open UPRN, under the Open Government Licence), which is why UPRNs are becoming the standard way public services and property systems refer to a property.
Why a UPRN beats an address
- Addresses are ambiguous. "Flat 1, 12 High Street" can be written a dozen ways, and different datasets abbreviate differently — address-string matching gets it wrong at the margins.
- Addresses change. Renames, renumbering and mergers break address joins; the UPRN survives all of them.
- One location, one reference. Records that carry the same official UPRN — such as EPC data — can be joined with high confidence. Other layers use different associations: Address Lens may match sold-price records from their address, while flood and planning screening is scoped to the postcode, so the report states each layer's precision separately.
How to look up a property by UPRN
- If you already have the UPRN (from a council record, a conveyancing pack or another property system), paste it straight into the Address Lens search — a bare UPRN opens the property directly.
- If you don't, search the postcode or full address; the property's report is keyed to its UPRN behind the scenes.
Not every property has every record. A UPRN identifies the location; it doesn't guarantee that an EPC, sold price or other dataset has an entry for it. A missing record usually means the event never happened (no sale since 1995, no EPC since 2008) — not that the property doesn't exist.