A typical London first-time buyer home worth £500,000 would incur a stamp duty bill of £10,000.
Richard Donnell, at property portal Zoopla, said: “Stamp duty is a real bind on first-time buyers and homeowners in London and the South East.
“On average, they would pay 3pc on the purchase price. For a buyer that’s another 3pc to find when property is already expensive. It’s a big cost on normal people.”
This is compared with the North of England, where just one in 10 property purchases fall above the threshold.
Stamp duty generated an estimated £16bn for the Treasury last year and is forecast to grow to £28bn by 2030-31, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
However, the number of transactions in the UK fell by around 70,000 in the first quarter of this year to 269,000, compared to 340,000 in 2025, according to official figures.
Mr Donnell added a rush to complete purchases ahead of changes were partly responsible for the higher number of transactions just before the April 1 deadline last year.
Jonathan Stinton, at Coventry Building Society, said the fall in Treasury receipts from stamp duty challenged the logic of continuing the levy at current rates.
He said: “Bringing more homes into the tax net might seem like an easy win for the Treasury, but if higher upfront costs discourage people from moving, the overall take can actually start to fall.
“Without a change to the system, the risk is we continue to slow down a housing market that depends on people being able to move freely – because you can’t turn up the tax without taking some steam out of the market.”
