Stamp Duty Land Tax applies only to property in England and Northern Ireland. Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and Wales charges Land Transaction Tax instead — genuinely different taxes with different bands, different thresholds and different reliefs. This stamp duty calculator covers SDLT only. If you are buying in Scotland or Wales, nothing on this page applies to your purchase and you need the Revenue Scotland or Welsh Revenue Authority figures instead.
Arb Digital builds free calculators that show their working rather than producing a bare total, and SDLT is a tax that badly needs the working shown. Every figure on this page is taken from the rate tables currently published on GOV.UK for the 2026/27 tax year, on the rates in force from 1 April 2025. Rates change at every Budget, so treat the date as part of the answer.
What This Stamp Duty Calculator Does
Enter a purchase price, say whether you are buying a main residence, buying as a first-time buyer, or buying an additional property, and flag whether the purchaser is non-UK resident. The calculator then applies the published band table one slice at a time and shows you the tax generated inside each individual band, not just the total. That breakdown is the point of the page.
It also reports the effective rate — the total tax as a percentage of the whole price — which is always lower than the top band rate you reached. People routinely conflate the two and conclude they owe far more than they do. Seeing "top band 5%" alongside "effective rate 2.14%" on the same screen fixes that misunderstanding faster than any amount of explanation.
How to Use It
- Enter the purchase price. SDLT is charged on the chargeable consideration, which for a straightforward purchase is the price paid for the property.
- Choose the buyer situation. Standard rates for an only or replacement main home, first-time buyer relief if you qualify, or the higher rates if the purchase leaves you owning more than one residential property.
- Set the residence flag. A non-UK resident purchaser usually pays a further 2% on top, and the SDLT residence test is its own test.
- Read the band breakdown, not just the headline. The bars show how much tax each slice of the price generated, which is where the number actually comes from.
- Check the result against GOV.UK's own calculator before you rely on it for anything. This page is an illustration of published bands; HMRC's tool and your conveyancing solicitor are the authority.
The Bands This Calculator Uses
These are the residential rates published on GOV.UK, applying from 1 April 2025, when the previous temporary thresholds came to an end. For a single residential property bought as an only or replacement main residence: nothing on the portion up to £125,000; 2% on the portion from £125,001 to £250,000; 5% on the portion from £250,001 to £925,000; 10% on the portion from £925,001 to £1.5 million; and 12% on the portion above £1.5 million.
Where the purchase means you will own more than one residential property, GOV.UK's guidance on higher rates of Stamp Duty Land Tax sets out a separate table applying from the same date: 5% up to £125,000, 7% on the next £125,000, 10% on the next £675,000, 15% on the next £575,000, and 17% above £1.5 million. That is the standard table with five percentage points added to every band, which is why the surcharge is usually described as "5% on top". The higher rates apply where the property costs £40,000 or more; below that figure the higher rates do not bite.
First-time buyer relief has its own two-band structure: no SDLT up to £300,000, then 5% on the portion from £300,001 to £500,000. The cap matters enormously and is covered in its own section below.
Why the Slice Structure Trips People Up
SDLT is a slice tax, sometimes called a progressive or marginal tax. Each rate applies only to the portion of the price falling inside that band. It has not been a slab tax — where one rate applies to the entire price — since 2014, but the belief that it still is remains extraordinarily persistent, and it leads buyers to badly overestimate their bill.
Take a £350,000 main residence. The first £125,000 is taxed at nothing. The next £125,000, the slice from £125,001 to £250,000, is taxed at 2% and produces £2,500. The remaining £100,000, the slice from £250,001 to £350,000, is taxed at 5% and produces £5,000. The total is £7,500. A buyer who assumed the 5% band applied to the whole price would have budgeted £17,500 and been wrong by ten thousand pounds.
The practical consequence is that there are no cliff edges in the standard table. Paying £1 more for a house never costs you thousands in extra SDLT, because that extra pound is only ever taxed at the rate of the band it lands in. That is true of the standard rates and of the higher rates. It is emphatically not true of first-time buyer relief.
The First-Time Buyer Cliff Edge at £500,000
This is the single most expensive surprise in SDLT and the reason this page exists in the form it does. First-time buyer relief gives you a £300,000 nil-rate band instead of £125,000, and charges 5% on the slice from £300,001 to £500,000. But GOV.UK is explicit: if the price is over £500,000, you cannot claim the relief at all. Not a reduced version of it — none of it.
Work the two sides. A first-time buyer paying exactly £500,000 pays nothing on the first £300,000 and 5% on the next £200,000, giving £10,000. A first-time buyer paying £500,001 loses the relief entirely and falls back to the standard table: nothing to £125,000, £2,500 on the slice to £250,000, and 5% on the £250,001 above that, giving just over £15,000. One extra pound on the purchase price costs roughly £5,000 in extra tax.
If you are a first-time buyer negotiating anywhere near half a million pounds, that cliff is worth more than almost any other point of negotiation. Enter £500,000 and then £500,001 in the calculator above and watch the total jump. It is the clearest demonstration of why a stamp duty estimate belongs in an offer decision rather than after it.
What Counts as an Additional Property
The higher rates are not only for landlords. They apply wherever completing the purchase leaves you owning more than one residential property anywhere in the world, which catches far more people than expected — someone buying with a partner who already owns a flat, someone who inherited a share of a family home, someone buying a new home before selling the old one.
That last case has a route back. GOV.UK's guidance states that if you sell or give away your previous main home within three years of buying the new one, you can apply for a refund of the higher-rate portion, provided the other conditions are met. Buyers in a broken chain often pay the higher rates at completion and reclaim later, so a higher-rate figure is not always a permanent cost. It is, however, cash you need on the day.
First-time buyer relief and the higher rates are mutually exclusive, which is why this calculator offers them as alternatives rather than as checkboxes. If the purchase attracts the higher rates, you are by definition not buying your only residential property.
What This Page Does Not Cover
SDLT has a great many regimes beyond the residential rates modelled here, and each is a different calculation. Purchases by companies and other non-natural persons can attract a flat higher charge above a threshold. Mixed-use property — a shop with a flat above it, or a house with genuine agricultural land — falls under non-residential rates that are substantially lower and are a frequent source of both legitimate saving and aggressive, unsuccessful reclaim schemes. Buying several dwellings in one transaction has its own rules. Leasehold purchases can attract a separate charge on the rent as well as on the premium. Shared ownership offers a choice between paying on the full market value up front or in stages.
None of those are handled here, and a calculator that silently applied residential rates to them would give a confidently wrong answer. If your purchase is anything other than a straightforward freehold residential buy, the band table on this page is the wrong tool and a conveyancing solicitor is the right one.
Budgeting Around the SDLT Bill
Stamp duty is paid in cash at completion and generally cannot be added to the mortgage, which makes it a deposit problem rather than a borrowing problem. It sits alongside legal fees, searches, survey and removal costs, and it is usually the largest single item among them. Once you know the figure, our mortgage calculator shows what the borrowing itself costs each month, and the rent vs buy calculator is a useful sanity check on whether the transaction costs are recovered over your likely time in the property — SDLT is precisely the kind of one-off cost that makes a short ownership period expensive.
Note that our closing cost calculator is built around United States settlement charges and includes no SDLT or any UK transaction tax, so it is not a substitute for this page. For the ongoing cost side of a UK move, the budget calculator is a more useful companion.
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Browse Free Tools Talk to Arb DigitalCommon Mistakes to Avoid
- Treating SDLT as a slab tax — applying the top band rate to the whole purchase price overstates the bill dramatically, often by five figures.
- Applying SDLT to a Scottish or Welsh purchase — those are LBTT and LTT, separate taxes with their own bands, and the answers differ materially.
- Assuming first-time buyer relief tapers away above £500,000 — it does not taper, it disappears completely, and the extra tax at £500,001 is around £5,000.
- Forgetting that a jointly bought property counts a partner's existing home — the higher rates look at what the buyers own between them, not just what you own.
- Using an old rate table — thresholds changed on 1 April 2025 and change again at Budgets, so a calculator that does not state its date is not usable.
Related Free Tools From Arb Digital
Pair this with the mortgage calculator for monthly borrowing costs and the rent vs buy calculator to test whether transaction costs are recovered. UK earners can check the income side with our UK take-home pay calculator, and the VAT calculator handles the other tax most UK households meet regularly. The full free online tools hub has the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Stamp Duty Land Tax applies to England and Northern Ireland only. Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and Wales charges Land Transaction Tax, and those are separate taxes with different bands, thresholds and reliefs. This page does not cover them, and applying these figures to a Scottish or Welsh purchase would give a wrong answer.
Slice by slice. Each band rate applies only to the portion of the price that falls inside that band. On a 350,000 pound main residence the first 125,000 is taxed at nothing, the next 125,000 at 2 per cent, and the remaining 100,000 at 5 per cent, giving 7,500 pounds rather than the much larger figure you get by applying 5 per cent to everything.
It is lost entirely. GOV.UK states that if the price is over 500,000 pounds you cannot claim the relief at all, so it does not taper away gradually. A first-time buyer at exactly 500,000 pounds pays about 10,000 pounds, while one paying a single pound more falls back to standard rates and pays roughly 15,000 pounds.
GOV.UK describes it as 5 per cent on top of the standard SDLT rates where buying a residential property means you will own more than one. Its published higher-rates table, applying from 1 April 2025, runs 5, 7, 10, 15 and 17 per cent across the same band edges. The higher rates apply where the property costs 40,000 pounds or more.
GOV.UK guidance states that if you sell or give away your previous main home within three years of buying the new one, you can apply for a refund of the higher-rate portion, provided the other conditions are met. Buyers caught by a chain often pay the higher rates at completion and reclaim afterwards, but the cash is still needed on completion day.
Usually yes. GOV.UK states that a non-resident purchaser normally pays a 2 per cent surcharge on residential property in England or Northern Ireland, on top of whichever rates otherwise apply. Residence for stamp duty purposes has its own statutory test and is not the same as residence for income tax, so check the position rather than assuming it.
It uses the residential rate tables currently published on GOV.UK for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, on the rates in force from 1 April 2025. Rates and thresholds change at each Budget, so always confirm against GOV.UK before relying on a figure, and remember that the return is filed by your conveyancer.
This is an illustration of published Stamp Duty Land Tax bands applied to a price you entered for the 2026/27 tax year — it is not a statement of tax owed, not tax advice, and not a substitute for HMRC's own SDLT calculator. Rates and thresholds change at each Budget, many purchases fall under regimes this page does not model, and your conveyancing solicitor files the return and is responsible for the figure. Check every number against HMRC guidance on GOV.UK and take advice from a conveyancing solicitor before you commit to a purchase.
