Prime London stamp duty bills enough to buy a house in many areas

It’s cheaper to buy a detached house in much of the UK than pay stamp duty in prime central London, research from Springbok Properties has found.

Since changes to stamp duty tax from the traditional slab scale method, the government has looked to make the cost more favourable for homebuyers, although those at the top end of the market have been left considerably worse off.

Analysis from the sale agents found that if you bought a detached house in Kensington and Chelsea, you would be facing a stamp duty bill of £318,800 on the typical house price of £3.38m.

For the same amount as that stamp duty bill, you could almost buy three detached homes in Northern Ireland, where they typically cost £108,400 each.

Properties are also far cheaper in Scotland (£266,300) and Wales (£248,300), although on a national level they are higher in England (£375,600).

However, looking at the UK house price rankings, there are some 167 areas where prime central London stamp duty sums exceed the average house price, with the cost sitting between the Isle of Wight (£319,510) and Hambleton (£316,909).

Shepherd Ncube, founder and CEO of Springbok Properties, said: “Stamp duty continues to be an additional financial burden that many fail to properly account for when buying a house and it can catch many potential buyers out as a result.

"The one silver lining for the average UK homebuyer is that they aren’t paying the astronomical sums required to purchase at the very top end of London’s property ladder.

"It’s quite astonishing that such sums are paid to cover stamp duty when many struggle to get on the ladder at all and this is just for a typical property sale, not a second home which would incur an additional three percent charge.

"The government has certainly achieved in its objective to dampen the appetite of foreign buyers in London’s prime market by adjusting the stamp duty thresholds, but this seems to have had an impact across the board and you can see why.”