A gilt's price falls when its yield rises and rises when its yield falls, because a fixed coupon has to be repriced to match what the market now demands — and the Change column shows that movement.
Price and yield always move apart
The single most useful fact about a gilt is that its price and its yield move in opposite directions. When the yield goes up, the price goes down; when the yield goes down, the price goes up. This is not a market quirk or a rule of thumb that sometimes fails — for a fixed-coupon gilt it is arithmetic. The two are the same number read two ways, so one cannot rise without the other falling.
The reason is that a gilt's coupon is fixed at issue, while the return the market wants is not. The price is the variable that reconciles the two. A gilt paying a 4% coupon is only worth paying less than £100 for if the market can now get more than 4% elsewhere; the fall in price raises the yield on the older gilt until it matches what the market demands. The same mechanism runs in reverse when the market's required return falls.
Why a fixed coupon forces the price to move
Picture a gilt issued when rates were 4%. Its coupon pays £4 a year and its price sits near £100. If rates then rise so that new debt pays 5%, the 4% gilt looks less attractive: nobody wants to pay £100 for £4 a year when £5 is available. The price has to fall until the £4 coupon plus the gain from buying below £100 adds up to a 5% return. The gilt still repays exactly £100 nominal at maturity; only the price the market will pay for it has changed.
The coupling is tight because the yield is calculated from the price. Once the price is set, the yield follows from it, and once the yield is set, the price follows from it. Watching a gilt's price and its yield is therefore watching one quantity from two angles, and a move in one is always matched by a move in the other.
How far the price moves
Not every gilt responds to a yield change to the same degree. A long-dated gilt, with many years of coupons still to come, has a longer stream of payments that the change in the discount rate acts upon, so its price moves more for a given change in yield. A short-dated gilt, closer to maturity, moves less. The measure of this sensitivity is the modified duration: roughly, how much the price moves when the yield moves by 1%, in years.
That is why a shift in the market can leave two gilts with visibly different price moves. The same rise in yields that nudges a short gilt down can knock a long gilt down much further. A reader comparing two rows should expect the longer one to swing more, and the modified duration column quantifies exactly that.
The Change column
The Change column, labelled Since the previous close, shows how far a gilt's yield has moved since the prior session. It is the daily heartbeat of the list: a positive figure means the yield rose, which for a fixed-coupon gilt means the price fell. The site groups the same figure into two Since the previous close views — gilts whose yield rose, so their price fell, and gilts whose yield fell, so their price rose — so a reader can see at a glance which got cheaper and which got dearer.
| What happened | Yield | Price | Who it helps |
| Market rates rose | Up | Down | A buyer, paying less |
| Market rates fell | Down | Up | A holder, seeing the price rise |
| No change | Flat | Flat | — |
The Change column is a measurement, not a forecast. It records what the last session did, not what the next one will do. Reading it as a description of the day's move is accurate; reading it as a signal about the future is not something the figure supports.
Where the moves show up
The yield-curve page plots every priced gilt against its fitted benchmark, so a shift in yields across the curve is visible as a whole rather than row by row. For a single gilt, the gilt's own page, opened from the conventional gilts list, carries a price history that shows how its clean price and yield have moved over time, which puts a one-day Change figure into the context of the range the gilt has traded in. A move that looks large in isolation can be small against a year of history, and the reverse.
The two views answer different questions. The curve shows the shape of yields across maturities on a given day; the history shows one gilt over time. Reading them together connects a single gilt's move to the broader repricing the curve records, so a reader can see whether a price change was local to one gilt or part of a shift along the whole curve.
What actually moves the market
Yields move for reasons that reach far beyond any single gilt: expectations about interest rates, the path of inflation, the balance of supply as the government issues new debt, and demand from buyers. None of these can be reduced to a single figure, and the site does not claim to forecast them. What it does is show, per gilt and across the curve, how the market has repriced. The Change column and the curve page describe that repricing; they do not predict the next one.
It is worth keeping the direction straight, because it is the thing readers most often get backwards. A headline that yields have risen is, for a holder of a fixed-coupon gilt, a story about prices falling. The two are one phenomenon, and the Change column is where the list shows it.
Background, not advice
This article explains why gilt prices and yields move apart; it is general background, not investment, tax or legal advice for any reader's circumstances. A price move before maturity is not a loss realised unless the gilt is sold, and the figure repaid at maturity is the nominal, not the price. The day's market data and the gilt's own history are the primary sources for real moves.