The headline on stamp duty changes is that, for once, there aren't any: the November 2025 Budget left SDLT untouched, despite months of briefing about abolition and property-tax reform. What buyers are actually living with is the aftermath of the last two rounds of change — the thresholds that reverted in April 2025 and the surcharges that jumped in October 2024 — plus a genuinely new property charge arriving in 2028 that is not SDLT at all. Old rate tables are everywhere online, so here is the current position in full.
The rates you actually pay in 2026/27
For residential purchases in England and Northern Ireland (gov.uk):
- 0% up to £125,000
- 2% from £125,001 to £250,000
- 5% from £250,001 to £925,000
- 10% from £925,001 to £1.5 million
- 12% above £1.5 million
First-time buyers pay nothing up to £300,000 and 5% on the slice to £500,000 — but the relief vanishes entirely above a £500,000 price: at £499,000 the SDLT is £9,950, while at £501,000 (standard rates, no relief) it is £15,050 — £5,100 more tax for £2,000 more house. These are the post-April 2025 figures, when the temporary 2022 uplifts expired; calculators and guides written during the generous window still circulate and still mislead.
Commercial and mixed-use property runs on its own gentler scale — 0% to £150,000, 2% to £250,000, 5% above — with none of the surcharges that follow. Scotland and Wales tax property under their own regimes (LBTT and LTT) with different bands and a steeper additional-dwelling charge north of the border.
The surcharges: where the real money moved
The October 2024 changes were aimed squarely at additional properties, and they remain in force:
- Second homes and buy-to-lets: a 5% surcharge on top of every band — so the effective range runs from 5% to 17%. On a £300,000 rental purchase, the surcharge alone is £15,000;
- Companies buying dwellings: the same 5%-loaded rates, or a flat 17% where a company pays over £500,000 for a dwelling and no relief (such as genuine letting business use) applies — a figure widely misquoted as the old 15%;
- Non-UK residents: a further 2% on residential purchases, stacking on top of everything above. A non-resident company buying a £600,000 flat can face 19%.
The surcharge system's one mercy is the replacement main residence rule: buy your new home before selling the old one and you pay the 5% surcharge up front, but sell the previous main home within three years and you reclaim it — the claim goes in within 12 months of that sale or 12 months of the original return's filing date, whichever is later. This refund is routinely missed after messy chain-breaks and separations; if you paid higher rates in the last few years and later sold the old home, check. It is real money sitting with HMRC. Our SDLT advice team recovers exactly these.
What the Budget did and didn't do
Autumn Budget 2025 confirmed no SDLT rate or threshold changes — the abolition talk stayed talk. What it did announce is a High Value Council Tax Surcharge from April 2028: an annual charge on English homes worth £2 million or more, from £2,500 to £7,500 a year depending on value, affecting roughly 165,000 properties. It is a recurring ownership charge collected through the council tax system, not a transaction tax — but for anyone modelling the cost of holding an expensive home, it belongs in the same spreadsheet as the SDLT they paid to buy it.
Could October's Budget reopen SDLT? Property taxation remains on every speculation list, and the political appetite for reforming a tax that gums up the housing market is real in both directions. Our standing advice is unchanged: transact on current law, and be sceptical of both "buy now before rates rise" and "wait for abolition" — both have been confidently wrong repeatedly.
Where SDLT quietly goes wrong
Beyond the headline rates, the recurring errors we untangle:
- Wrong classification. Mixed-use claims (a flat over a shop, a house with genuine agricultural land) move a purchase to the commercial scale and can save six figures — but HMRC litigates aggressive claims hard, and paddock-and-garden arguments mostly lose;
- Surcharge misapplication. Married couples are treated as one unit; an overseas property counts as an existing dwelling; inherited shares can count. People pay the 5% they didn't owe, and don't pay the 5% they did, in roughly equal numbers;
- Linked transactions and chattels games. Genuine movable chattels (curtains, freestanding furniture) can sit outside the land price at honest values — but fixtures form part of the land, and inflated "chattels" allocations are an enquiry magnet;
- Missed reliefs — multiple dwellings relief is gone, but group relief, charity relief and the company-letting carve-outs from the 17% rate remain, and remain unclaimed.
SDLT is self-assessed with a 14-day filing window, which means the analysis has to be right at completion, not discovered afterwards. For straightforward purchases the conveyancer's calculation is fine; for anything with a surcharge question, a company, mixed use or a reclaim, a second pair of eyes costs little against the numbers involved. That is us: SDLT advice, alongside property tax planning for the landlords and investors who meet this tax most often.