Stamp duty bills have soared at four times the pace of house prices as a stealth tax raid crushes England’s housing market.
The tax paid to move home in England has surged by 194pc since 2015 from £1,557 to £4,572, according to Hamptons data.
This is more than quadruple the 44pc rise in home values over the same period, with the price of a typical home climbing from £202,860 to £291,445.
The disproportionate rise in tax bills has been entirely driven by fiscal drag as higher house price growth pulls homebuyers into higher tax bands.
Analysts have warned this is snarling up the housing market and hurting the wider economy.
Richard Donnell, the executive director of research at Zoopla, said: “After mortgage affordability, stamp duty has probably got the biggest impact on how many people might move home.
“And when you start hitting average homeowners who want to move for jobs or for family reasons, then you’re hitting labour mobility and you’re hitting the economy.”
Stamp duty is a tax paid on the purchase price of properties in England and Northern Ireland. Wales and Scotland have similar but separate transaction taxes.
New homeowners must now pay a bill worth 1.6pc of their property’s value, up from 0.8pc when the bands were last adjusted.
In 2014, stamp duty reforms were introduced that reduced the tax bill on lower-priced homes and raised rates for higher-value properties.
Since then, stamp duty has been charged at banded rates, starting at 2pc on the value of a home above £125,000, rising to 5pc on the value above £250,000, then to 10pc above £925,000 and to a top rate of 12pc on the portion above £1.5m.
However, the stamp duty bands have never been permanently adjusted in line with house price growth.
This means that stamp duty has become a stealth tax raid, with the Treasury’s revenue increasing dramatically as buyers are pulled into higher tax bands.
The Treasury raked in £15.1bn in stamp duty land tax in 2025-26 – 42pc higher than a decade earlier, just after the rates were adjusted.
