Key takeaways
- At the rates in force from 1 April 2025, a home mover pays £1,500 on a £200,000 house in England and £43,750 on a £1,000,000 one.
- First-time buyer relief is worth exactly £5,000 at any price from £300,000 to £500,000, and nothing at all above £500,000.
- Paying £500,001 rather than £500,000 costs a first-time buyer £5,000 more tax, because the relief is withdrawn in full instead of tapered.
- London's average price was £550,037 in July 2026, above the £500,000 relief cap, so the average London home qualifies for no relief.
- The 5% additional-property surcharge is £10,000 of the £11,500 due on a £200,000 buy-to-let, which is 87% of the bill.
What stamp duty in 2026 costs at six prices
You're buying in England and you want one number: what does the tax take? Here it is, before any of the explanation.
Stamp duty land tax applies in England and Northern Ireland. GOV.UK's current rates are nil up to £125,000, then "2%" on "the portion from £125,001 to £250,000", "5%" on "the portion from £250,001 to £925,000", 10% to £1.5 million and 12% above that. First-time buyers pay "no SDLT up to £300,000" and "5% SDLT on the portion from £300,001 to £500,000". Anyone who'd own more than one home after the purchase pays "5% on top of SDLT rates". Those three rules produce three very different bills on the same house.
| Price | First-time buyer | Home mover | Additional property | Mover's effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £200,000 | £0 | £1,500 | £11,500 | 0.75% |
| £300,000 | £0 | £5,000 | £20,000 | 1.67% |
| £425,000 | £6,250 | £11,250 | £32,500 | 2.65% |
| £500,000 | £10,000 | £15,000 | £40,000 | 3.00% |
| £750,000 | £27,500 | £27,500 | £65,000 | 3.67% |
| £1,000,000 | £43,750 | £43,750 | £93,750 | 4.38% |
Two columns merge at £750,000. That isn't a rounding artefact: above £500,000 a first-time buyer is taxed as though they'd owned a home before. The relief doesn't shrink as the price rises. It stops.
Why the stamp duty land tax rates for 2026 look higher than the bill
The percentages are marginal, which means each rate applies only to the slice of the price inside its band. GOV.UK works one through: a £295,000 house gives "0% on the first £125,000 = £0", "2% on the second £125,000 = £2,500" and "5% on the final £45,000 = £2,250", for a "total SDLT = £4,750". Nobody pays 5% of £295,000.
So the rate you actually pay is well under the band rate you landed in, and the chart above tracks it. At £200,000 a mover's effective rate is 0.75%. At £1,000,000, where the top slice is taxed at 10%, the effective rate is 4.38%. That gap is the single most common misreading of this tax, and it's why a headline band rate tells you almost nothing about your own number. The objection to putting it this way is fair: an effective rate of 3% sounds mild, and £15,000 on a £500,000 house doesn't. The percentage describes the tax's shape, not its weight, and the cash can't be borrowed against the house the way a deposit shortfall sometimes can.
It's also why the tax is concentrated at the top. HMRC's Annual Stamp Tax Statistics for 2024 to 2025 report that homes over £1 million were "3% of all residential transactions" but "41% of total residential SDLT receipts". Homes at £250,000 or less were "44% of transactions" and "6% of total residential SDLT receipts".
Stamp duty 2026 for first time buyers: £5,000, then a cliff
Compare the two columns and the relief has a flat value. At £300,000 a mover pays £5,000 and a first-time buyer pays nothing. At £425,000 it's £11,250 against £6,250. At £500,000 it's £15,000 against £10,000. The difference is £5,000 every time, because the relief shifts the nil-rate band from £125,000 to £300,000 and the slice in between would have been taxed at 2% and 5%.
Then it ends abruptly. GOV.UK is explicit: "If the price is over £500,000, you cannot claim the relief." At £500,000 a first-time buyer owes £10,000. At £500,001 they owe £15,000. One extra pound of price carries £5,000 of extra tax, and there's no taper to soften it. The £300,000 threshold is nothing like that, because it's a band edge rather than a cliff: at £300,001 the charge is five pence.
Agreeing a price just under £500,000 is therefore worth more than the same discount anywhere else on the curve. Whether a seller sees it that way is a different question, and the relief's design is what creates the bunching.
The £500,000 cap is a cash figure, and London has already passed it
The cap doesn't move with prices. The UK House Price Index for July 2026, updated on 18 September 2026, puts the average London property at £550,037, down 3.3% over the year. That's above the cap, so a first-time buyer paying the London average gets no relief and owes £17,502, an effective 3.18%. The savings side has the same problem at a lower threshold, because the £450,000 cap on the Lifetime ISA and on the proposed first time buyer ISA also sits below the London average.
Outside London the picture inverts. England's average was £293,479 in July 2026. A mover there owes £4,674, a first-time buyer owes nothing, and an additional-property buyer owes £19,348 on the identical house. The index also tracks buyer type for Great Britain: the average first-time buyer paid £229,302 in July 2026, where the relief saves £2,086 and the £500,000 cap is irrelevant.
The entry tax is a one-off, and it's small next to what follows it; the true cost of owning a home is mostly the annual lines rather than the purchase.
That split shows up in HMRC's regional data. Of the £772 million relieved through First Time Buyers' Relief in 2024 to 2025, "London and the South East accounted for £453 million of the relief", which HMRC puts at "59% of the total". The relief is largest where prices are highest, right up to the point where prices pass the cap and it disappears.
On a cheap buy-to-let the surcharge is most of the tax
The additional-property rates run "5%" up to £125,000, "7%" to £250,000, "10%" to £925,000, "15%" to £1.5 million and "17%" above. Because the surcharge starts at the first pound, it's 5% of the whole price however cheap the property is, while the underlying bands still start at nil.
At £200,000 the total is £11,500, of which £10,000 is surcharge: 87% of the bill. At £1,000,000 the total is £93,750, of which £50,000 is surcharge, so the share falls to 53%. The surcharge bites hardest on exactly the stock that landlords buy most of. In the last quarter HMRC published before discontinuing the series, "54% of HRAD transactions were under £250,000 in Q1 2025", out of "53,800" liable transactions in that quarter.
Which is why a £200,000 flat is taxed at 5.75% as a second property and 0.75% as a home. The house is the same. The buyer isn't. If you're weighing what a rental actually returns, the entry tax belongs in the arithmetic alongside the other costs set out in the second home stamp duty figures, and the ongoing position depends on the landlord tax on property income.
What changed on 1 April 2025, and what the statute says
The current bands aren't new policy so much as the end of a temporary one. The Stamp Duty Land Tax (Temporary Relief) Act 2023 modified the rates for any transaction whose effective date fell in a period "beginning with 23 September 2022" and "ending with 31 March 2025". During that window the nil-rate band was £250,000 and the first-time buyer thresholds were "£425,000" and "£625,000". From 1 April 2025 the statutory tables reverted.
The effect on a mover was modest: £2,500 more at most prices, and £1,500 more at £200,000, where the band restored was only partly used. The effect on a first-time buyer at £425,000 was sharper, from nothing to £6,250, because the whole £125,000 slice above £300,000 moved into charge at once.
The surcharge moved separately. HMRC records that "At Autumn Budget 2024, HRAD surcharge was announced to increase from 3% to 5% from 31 October 2024". Finance Act 2025 carries both halves of that change, in "50 Increased rates for additional dwellings: transactions before 1 April 2025" and "51 Increased rates for additional dwellings: transactions on or after 1 April 2025", where the second table reads "So much as does not exceed £125,000" at "5%" up to "The remainder (if any)" at "17%".
Receipts followed. HMRC reports that "SDLT receipts increased by 20% from £11,615 million to £13,885 million between financial year 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025", with residential receipts up 21% "from £8,570 million to £10,380 million". HMRC attributes part of that to the surcharge rise and part to "forestalling effects, where buyers sought to purchase properties before the changes to SDLT thresholds became effective from 1 April 2025".
Two HMRC pages disagree about the first-time buyer cap
Worth knowing if you check your own figure against HMRC's commentary. The discontinued quarterly release says the thresholds would "revert to pre-September 2022 level of £300,000 and £425,000, respectively". Section 12 of the same document says they revert "to their pre-September 2022 levels of £125,000, £300,000 and £500,000".
The second one is right. The Act it describes raised the purchase-price limit by substituting "£625,000" for "£500,000", so the pre-September 2022 limit it reverts to is £500,000, and GOV.UK's live guidance says the same. The £425,000 in the first passage is the old nil-rate band, not the cap. One number, two meanings, and a reader checking a £480,000 purchase against the wrong sentence would conclude they owe £14,000 rather than £9,000.
What's been said about stamp duty at the Budget on 28 October 2026
The date is settled. The Chancellor's letter to the Treasury Select Committee, published on 31 July 2026, says: "I have asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to prepare an economic and fiscal forecast for publication on 28 October 2026. This will be accompanied by the Budget."
What's in it isn't settled, and nothing below is a measure. Mortgage Introducer reported on 28 July 2026 that Prime Minister Andy Burnham had ruled out changes: "Asked directly whether the government intended to alter or abolish the tax, Burnham was unequivocal. 'Yes, I can say that quite clearly. That won't be happening,' he told reporters." The same report notes he had previously supported replacing stamp duty and council tax with a land value tax. That's a dated statement to reporters in July, not a published policy document. Every figure on this page comes from the rules in force, and the Budget document on 28 October 2026 is the thing that settles whether they still apply afterwards.
For scale on what any change would be moving: residential SDLT raised £10,380 million in 2024 to 2025, and 155,400 transactions claimed First Time Buyers' Relief in that year, at an average relief HMRC puts at "£5,000" nationally and "£7,000" in London.
Scotland and Wales charge a different tax entirely
None of the above applies outside England and Northern Ireland. Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, where Revenue Scotland's residential nil-rate band is £145,000 on rates that have run since 1 April 2021. Wales charges Land Transaction Tax, where the Welsh Government's main residential rates start above £225,000 on the table in force from 10 October 2022. Different thresholds, different band widths, different reliefs. A calculator built for stamp duty in 2026 gives the wrong answer for a house in Cardiff or Glasgow, and the bands aren't close enough for a rough estimate to be useful.
What these figures leave out
The table covers freehold purchases of a single dwelling by a UK resident. Several things sit outside it, and each can move your number.
- Non-UK residents pay "a 2% surcharge" on top of whatever else applies, so a non-resident additional-property buyer stacks both.
- New residential leases attract SDLT on the rent as well as the premium, at "1% on the portion over £125,000" of net present value.
- Buying before selling means paying the surcharge, with a refund available if "your previous main residence was sold within 36 months of completing your new purchase".
- Linked purchases, six or more dwellings in one transaction, shared ownership and companies all run on separate rules.
The price data has limits too. UK HPI estimates for recent months are provisional and get revised, and the index flags "an error in the calculation of first-time buyer and former owner occupier prices prior to January 2026". The quarterly SDLT series was discontinued after Q1 2025, so the most recent transaction-level detail is the annual release updated on 11 March 2026. An average price isn't a house you can buy, either. It cannot tell you what you'll be quoted, only where the bands bite across a whole region.
What would change these numbers
Three things, in order of how fast they'd act. The Budget on 28 October 2026 is the first, and until the document exists the honest position is that nothing has been announced. Reporting about what a Budget might contain has no effect on a completion date.
The second is slower and already running. Every threshold here is fixed in cash, so each year of price growth pulls more of a purchase into charge without any rate changing. London's average has already crossed the £500,000 relief cap. The South East is the next region up, at £380,878 in July 2026, which leaves £119,122 of headroom before the cap would start to bite there.
The third is the one people forget. HMRC says the 20% receipts increase between 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025 is "partly explained by the uplift to the HRAD surcharge rate from 3% to 5%", and the surcharge is what makes a £200,000 purchase carry a 5.75% effective rate. It isn't a minority case either: HRAD transactions were "34% of all liable residential transactions" in Q1 2025. The 5% figure is the part of the system with the widest reach at the bottom of the market. If you're costing a move rather than a purchase, the tax is only one line among several, and the rest of them are itemised in the cost of moving house.