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Stamp duty on property — 2026/27

Three taxes, three sets of bands, and three different answers to the same question. SDLT in England and Northern Ireland, LBTT in Scotland and LTT in Wales, for every kind of buyer — with the cliff edges that make one extra pound of asking price cost thousands.

Regime

Rate bands

Assumptions & sources
  • Three separate taxes, not three rates of one tax. Stamp Duty Land Tax applies in England and Northern Ireland, Land and Buildings Transaction Tax in Scotland, and Land Transaction Tax in Wales. They have different bands, different thresholds, different reliefs, and they disagree about who counts as needing help. Which one you pay is decided by where the property is, not where you live.
  • All three are slice taxes. Each band's rate applies only to the part of the price falling inside it, so crossing a threshold never makes the whole purchase more expensive. That was the old "slab" system, abolished for SDLT in 2014, and it is why the marginal rate chart is a clean staircase. The genuine cliff edges that remain are the reliefs and surcharges below, which switch a whole schedule on or off.
  • First-time buyer relief is where the regimes differ most. England and Northern Ireland give a £300,000 nil band and a 5% band to £500,000 — but the relief vanishes entirely above £500,000, so a pound over the limit costs about £5,000. Scotland gives a smaller relief, a nil band of £175,000 worth up to £600, but with no upper price limit at all. Wales gives no first-time buyer relief whatsoever, so in Wales a first-time buyer pays the standard rates.
  • The surcharges start at £40,000, and they start abruptly. Buy an additional property for £39,999 and no surcharge applies; buy it for £40,000 and the whole price is surcharged. That is a cliff of £2,000 in England and Northern Ireland, £2,000 in Wales and £3,200 in Scotland, where the Additional Dwelling Supplement is charged at 8% on the entire price rather than through a separate band schedule.
  • England and Northern Ireland reached the surcharge a different way. Its higher rates for additional dwellings are a whole separate schedule, but the schedule works out at exactly the standard rates plus 5% of the whole price — an identity the self-checks below assert at every price. Wales does the same thing with its own higher schedule, which is broadly five points above its main rates.
  • The non-UK resident surcharge is SDLT only. Two percentage points on every band, including the nil band, so a non-resident pays 2% from the first pound. Scotland and Wales have no equivalent, which is why changing the residence control moves only one line.
  • Companies. In England and Northern Ireland a company or other non-natural person buying a dwelling for more than £500,000 pays a flat 17% on the whole price — not a slice ladder, which is why that line goes flat and why the tax jumps at £500,000. Crucially, that flat rate is commonly disapplied: a genuine property rental business, a property developer or a trade using the dwelling can usually claim relief and fall back to the higher rates for additional dwellings. This tool shows the flat rate, because that is the default, but for most corporate landlords the additional-property line is the realistic one. Scotland and Wales have no flat-rate equivalent; a company there simply pays the additional-property rates.
  • Not modelled: leases, where the rent is taxed separately on its net present value and the rules diverge again between the three regimes; multiple dwellings and linked transactions; the six-dwelling rule that makes a bulk purchase non-residential; mixed-use apportionment; replacement-of-main-residence refunds when the old home sells within the time limit; group, charity and other reliefs; anything about who is a first-time buyer or what counts as a dwelling. Every one of those can move the answer a long way.
  • The two tax years are identical. Nothing in any of the three regimes changed between them: SDLT last moved on 1 April 2025 when the temporary thresholds ended, Scotland's Additional Dwelling Supplement on 5 December 2024, and Wales's higher residential rates on 11 December 2024. The Scottish and Welsh Budgets for 2026-27 both held their rates, and no SDLT change was announced. The year selector is kept so the two years diverge cleanly when one of them does.
  • Rates were checked against the published tables for each regime rather than carried over from memory, and every figure in the self-checks below was computed by hand from the bands before the code was written. Dates of effect are stated above so you can tell whether this page has gone stale.

An illustration, not tax advice, and stamp duty is a tax where the detail decides the answer. Check the assumptions before relying on anything here, and take advice on anything involving a company, a lease, more than one dwelling or a property that is not simply somebody's home.