How it works
What is Annual Ground Rent? It is the yearly rental value of a site, the land without its buildings. Buildings are left out, because whoever built them made that value. The land's value is created by the community around it and by nature, not by the owner.
We show figures for Data Zones for now. Our aim is to value each piece of land by the square metre, year by year, built up step by step from accurate public data.
How an area is valued
- In towns, we start from local house prices. We take away what it would cost to rebuild the house. What is left is roughly the value of the land. We turn that into a yearly rent.
- In the countryside, we use one farmland rent for each square metre of land, the same across Scotland.
- Natural resource rents and the services of nature are part of Annual Ground Rent, shown as separate parts; parts with different labels are never added into one total.
- Limits on use (nature sites, flood risk, crofting) follow the rule Constraint: changes best use, adds no value.
Small areas, added up honestly
Every figure belongs to a Data Zone. Data Zones fit inside council areas, and council areas make up Scotland. This is the Scottish Government's own system. We add up each kind of figure (Market, Modelled, Estimate) separately, and never across different price years. Nothing is counted twice.
We show each small area on its own. We don't add areas up into council or Scotland figures.
These five levels nest. Each larger area is made from the areas inside it, starting from the one below. The map shows Data Zones now. RoS land parcels and 3m grid squares come later. We do not publish a Scotland total or a council total yet.
- Scotland
- council area
- Data Zone, live
- RoS land parcel
- 3m grid squares, later
Words we use
- Annual Ground Rent
- the yearly rental value of a site, the land without its buildings. It is public value, created by the community and by nature, not by the owner.
- Data Zone
- a small area used by the Scottish Government for statistics, usually home to 500–1,000 people. Scotland has about 7,400 of them (2022 set). We show figures for Data Zones, never for single plots.
- Market / Modelled / Estimate
- how a figure was found. Market = taken from real prices people paid. Modelled = worked out from related prices. Estimate = used when there is no market price, like peat holding carbon. We never add different kinds together.
- Constraint
- a rule that limits how land can be used, like a nature protection area or flood risk. Constraint: changes best use, adds no value.
- OGL
- the Open Government Licence. It lets anyone use, share and build on public data if they say where it came from.
How sure are these numbers?
They are estimates, and some inputs can't be pinned down exactly. With other sensible assumptions, a Data Zone rent range in most councils could be anywhere from about half to 1.3 times our central estimate. Where house prices are low compared with rebuild costs, the range is wider: about half to double. This covers home Data Zones, not farmland, and never a single-property figure. Figures go through a separate checking step before anything is published. That step is part of the Scot-LAND model, not an outside review.
What's missing
Old land records not yet digital; private owners (we never show them); natural-resource figures not yet split by Data Zone; Edinburgh's planning allocations; national common grazings boundaries. Full list: Data & sources.
Credits
- Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026
- National Records of Scotland: © Crown copyright 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0
- Contains Scottish Government data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0