UK Stamp Duty Changes in 2025: What Buyers Need to Know

From 1 April 2025, the SDLT nil-rate threshold for standard purchases reverted from £250,000 to £125,000, and the first-time buyer nil-rate threshold reverted from £425,000 to £300,000. Both thresholds had been temporarily raised; that uplift was always scheduled to expire, and it did. Buyers completing after 1 April 2025 pay noticeably more SDLT on the same purchase price than they would have the day before, purely because more of the price now falls outside the nil-rate band.

For first-time buyers, the practical effect depends heavily on price. Below £300,000, nothing changes — the nil-rate band still covers the whole purchase. Between £300,000 and £425,000, a buyer who would have paid £0 SDLT under the old £425,000 threshold now pays 5% on the portion above £300,000, since that portion no longer sits inside the nil-rate band. And above £500,000, first-time buyer relief doesn't apply at all — it's withdrawn entirely rather than tapered, so those buyers pay standard rates on the full price, exactly as a home mover would.

Second-home buyers and buy-to-let investors face a separate, compounding change: the higher-rates surcharge rose from 3% to 5% on 31 October 2024, and it applies to the entire purchase price on top of standard SDLT. On a £400,000 additional property, the surcharge alone is now £20,000, up from £12,000 before the increase — an extra £8,000 in tax with no change to the property's value. Because the surcharge is a flat percentage of the full price rather than a banded rate, its impact scales directly with property value, which matters most for investors buying at the higher end of the market.

The practical takeaway is the same for every buyer type: SDLT liability on an identical property can now be materially higher than it would have been a year earlier, purely due to threshold and surcharge changes rather than anything about the property itself. Run the exact numbers for your situation — first-time buyer, home mover, or additional-property purchase — before you exchange, using our UK Stamp Duty Calculator, since the gap between the old and new rules is large enough to affect what you can actually afford to offer.