Finding current and historical UK share prices

The ICAEW Library & Information Service does not offer a share price service, but can usually provide share prices for the following dates:

• March 31st 1982
• April 6th 1965

Prices for market value at launch can also be provided where available.

This information is only available to authorised users.

If you would like to know more about the information we can offer, please call us on +44 (0)20 7920 8620, email library@icaew.com or contact us through webchat.

When looking for share prices, consider what figures you're looking for and whether the price you want is current or historical.

If you want to know average share prices for the day, these are commonly reported in the national press. If you want the latest trade, you will need an online share service. For the volume traded, consult the Stock Exchange Daily Official List.

The Financial Times contains the largest collection of UK stock market listings available to the general public.

The London Share Service is published inside the "Companies and Markets" section of the newspaper and gives share prices from the previous trading day. A selection of additional figures are also provided, depending on the day of publication:

For Investment Companies, certain other figures are provided in place of Yld, and/or P/E, and/or Vol 000s, depending on applicability.

The prices quoted represent all trading activity carried out through the London Stock Exchange on the previous business day. To get the share price for a specific date you will need to look in the next day's publication.

The ICAEW Library aims to keep the last 6 months' worth of market data pages from the FT, and the Guildhall Library in London holds the FT from 1888 onwards in various formats. Some other public libraries also hold copies of the FT, with varying temporal coverage. In addition, scans of the market information published in the FT for the last five years are available in digital format via the online FT Data Archive (subscription required) — see below.

The Times newspaper publishes share and commodity prices in its Business section. As with the Financial Times, the prices quoted refer to trading activity on the previous business day.

The ICAEW Library holds The Times on microfilm for the years 1900-1920 and 1937-1975 (March 1915 - January 1916 is currently missing). However, the Library is currently unable to provide access to its microfilm collection. We apologise for any inconvenience.

The Daily Official List (DOL) is a daily publication of official quotations for all securities traded on the London Stock Exchange, published by the London Stock Exchange and ICE Data Services. It was formerly issued in print format, but is now published online as eDOL — see below for more information.

DOL entries give details of the quotation used for the basis of valuations, the lowest and highest trades, and the total volume of shares traded on that day. They also list the business completed on that day with the time, volume and price of trades. In contrast to the newspapers, the DOL gives the prices for the date quoted on the publication and not the previous day's prices.

Each issue comes with errata covering instances where the day's trading has been misreported to the Stock Exchange.

The ICAEW Library holds the List from January 1967 to December 2003 (with the exception of the period 1972-1975) on microfilm/microfiche. However, the Library is currently unable to provide access to its microfilm collection. We apologise for any inconvenience.

The Guildhall Library holds it from 1899 onwards in various formats.

The Capital Gains Tax Service is published annually by ICE Data Services. It lists share prices at 31st March 1982 for CGT purposes and is supplemented by a monthly looseleaf for the year in progress.

The Library holds the latest edition. We also hold archived volumes of the Capital Gains Tax Service for the years 1965/66 to 1987/88 (Volumes A-I and J-Z). The volumes cover the period from 6th April 1965 (budget day) to 5th April 1988.

The ICAEW Library holds two copies of the publication CGT- capital gains; the key figures for calculating your tax (Financial Times, 1985), which reproduces tables from the Financial Times on 7 April 1965 and 1 April 1982, showing share prices for 6 April 1965 and 31 March 1982.

Share prices are listed for both dates exactly as they were printed in the original editions.

The Council of the Stock Exchange issued a supplement to the Special Edition of the Stock Exchange Daily Official List (SEDOL) and Monthly Supplement dated 6th April 1965 (budget day). The supplement lists the market value of shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange on 6th April 1965, for the purpose of Capital Gains Tax.

It is more comprehensive in its coverage than the aforementioned Financial Times publication, CGT - Capital Gains; the Key Figures for Calculating Your Tax (see above).

The ICAEW Library holds one copy of this publication.

The London Stock Exchange maintains a free News and Prices service, which provides current prices with a time delay of at least 15 minutes. Through this service you can look up individual stocks, or view the day's top nine risers, fallers and volume leaders. The service also provides news, basic company information, trading information, a chart of share price performance, and the number and value of trades. The information listed for individual securities includes:

• current bid/offer;
• current price;
• high/low;
• volume;
• last closing price;
• the last 5 trades.

The London Stock Exchange also provides online access to share price data through its SEDOL Masterfile service, and through eDOL, an electronic version of its Daily Official List (DOL) — the definitive legal record of daily trading activity on the London Stock Exchange, published in partnership with ICE Data Services. SEDOL Masterfile is a subscription service, whilst copies of eDOL are available either via subscription or through one-off purchase.

In addition, the London Stock Exchange offers a Historical Price Service (HPS) which provides values for all securities traded on the London Stock Exchange dating back to 1999.

The FT's Equities: Find a company online tool allows you to search for an equity or fund and narrow your search by country. The data available includes share prices, market capitalisation and P/E ratios.

The FT also provides online access to share price data through its Data Archive (subscription required). The Data Archive — probably the largest collection of UK market indices and their constituent share prices — holds scans of the market information published in the FT for the last five years. To access share price data via the FT Data Archive, follow the below steps:

1. Click on the funnel to the right of the 'Browse reports' heading. This will reveal options to filter the reports by category and specify a date range.
2. Choose the option to Filter reports by the category of 'Popular print', and select the option 'London share service pages'.
3. Select a report from the list to download it in PDF format.

Yahoo Finance UK publishes current UK share price data supplied by ICE Data Services, with a delay of at least 15-20 minutes.

In addition, the site also offers a free service for historical share prices. The temporal range of the data available varies from company to company, stretching back to the early 1970s in some cases.

To use the historical share price service you can search using the company look-up on the Yahoo Finance homepage, or browse the components of the major UK indices by following the steps below:

1. Choose between the FTSE 100, FTSE 250, FTSE AIM, FTSE ALL-SHARE or FTSE techMARK Focus indices.
2. Select the company that you are interested in. When the company profile loads, click on the option for ‘Historical data’, located on the left-hand side of the page.
3. The next screen displays the most recent prices and allows you to set a bespoke date range with an option to view the prices daily, weekly or monthly.

Historical share price datasets can be downloaded in CSV format.

The Yahoo Finance UK service represents a great resource for straightforward share price enquiries. However, it is not as useful for more complex enquiries, such as where companies have merged. For example, if you were looking for Guinness or Grand Met share prices from before Diageo existed (the merger took place in December 1997) you would need to know to search under Diageo, as searching for either of the previous company names returns no results.

Some UK public libraries offer their members online access to current and/or historical content from the Financial Times and The Times, including share price data.

For example, the City of London's Barbican & Community Libraries provide their members with remote online access to the Financial Times historical archive (1888-2016), along with The Times digital archive (1785-2019).

You may wish to contact your local library for information on the content they make available electronically. Relatively few public libraries offer online access to the Financial Times historical archive, but many do provide their members with electronic access to The Times digital archive (with varying coverage), and/or to recent issues of both the Financial Times and The Times.

Many companies provide share price information through their own online channels.

Some companies provide this data via a 'corporate' or 'investor' section of their main website — as in the case of Taylor Wimpey. Others — such as Tesco — make such information available through a dedicated corporate microsite.

For guidance on how to find other related information, see the following pages:

• International share prices
• Beta values
• Price/earnings ratios
• Gilt prices
• Dividends