Interim 2024-based housing-led population projections

An interim version of the GLA's 2024-based housing-led population projections were produced in April 2026. These projections incorporated housing assumptions based on preliminary data from the 2026 London Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA).

Three variants of the projections are included here. All are based on the same housing trajectories, and differ in terms of the overarching migration, fertility, and mortality assumptions used:

• Central - 15 years of past migration patterns, principal fertility, principal mortality

• High - 15 years of past migration patterns, high fertility, high mortality

• Low - 10 years of past migration patterns, low fertility, low mortality

The outputs are published here for local authorities and (2022) electoral wards within London and (2023) local authority districts in the wider region.

The inclusion of areas outside of London in the housing-led model is intended to help capture the impacts on London's population of differing levels of housing delivery in surrounding areas. The extension of the model beyond London was deemed necessary following recent changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which removed the previous link between trend-based demographic projections and assessments of housing need (and therefore local housing targets).

Note: Results for districts outside of London are included in the outputs primarily for transparency and should not be interpreted as dedicated projections to be used for those areas. These projections were produced without reference to current or future local plans or assessments of housing capacity in areas outside of London.

For districts outside of London, assumptions about future housing delivery were derived as follows:

• Objectively assessed housing need for each district was calculated using the National Planning Policy Framework's Standard Method

• Assumed housing delivery for each district was calculated by multiplying its Standard Method need figure by the ratio of:

London's assumed annual housing delivery / London's Standard Method need figure

Note: these are not the full version of the 2024-based projections. These projections were available internally within the Greater London Authority to inform development of the Draft London Plan and are published here as part of its evidence base.

The final outputs will include a number of significant differences from the interim projections:

• Adjustments to account for identified issues in official estimates of the population of children

• Housing assumptions based on the published version of the London SHLAA

• Methodological updates to the estimation and projection of fertility and migration

• An update to the approach used to convert dwellings into nominal households to address localised issues with occupation rates captured by the 2021 census