UK · Research
Second-home stamp duty: the same house costs 42% more in Scotland
Buy a second home at £315,000, the median price of an English town, and you pay £21,500 in England, £21,450 in Wales — and £30,550 in Scotland. Stamp duty was devolved in 2015 and 2018, and the three nations have since chosen three different ways to tax an additional property. The gap is now large enough to change where a purchase makes sense.
Soloren LeeProperty market research
Three taxes, three mechanisms
This is not one tax with three rate cards. Each nation attaches the additional-property charge in a structurally different way, and that structure — not the headline percentage — is what drives the gap.
England and Northern Ireland add 5 percentage points to every SDLT band. A buyer keeps the nil-rate band's shape; it simply becomes a 5% band.
Scotland charges the Additional Dwelling Supplement at 8% of the entire purchase price, on top of LBTT. It is not banded and there is no slice below which it stops, so it lands hardest where prices are lowest — as a share of the bill, a cheap Scottish second home is taxed the most.
Wales abandoned the surcharge model in December 2024 and now charges additional properties from a separate table starting at 5% on the first pound. The main-rate nil band of £225,000, the highest in the UK, does not exist on that table.
What the bill actually is
Every figure below is the full tax bill on an additional residential property, computed from the published rates of each authority. £40,000 is in the table because it is where all three charges switch on: a pound below it, an additional property is taxed like any other.
| Purchase price | England & NI | Scotland | Wales |
|---|---|---|---|
| £40,000 | £2,000 | £3,200 | £2,000 |
| £150,000 | £8,000 | £12,100 | £7,500 |
| £250,000 | £15,000 | £22,100 | £14,950 |
| £315,000 (median English town) | £21,500 | £30,550 | £21,450 |
| £400,000 | £30,000 | £45,350 | £29,950 |
| £750,000 | £65,000 | £108,350 | £73,700 |
Reading the table
Scotland is dearer at every price in the table, and the gap widens as prices rise. At the median English town price the Scottish bill is 42% above the English one — £9,050 in cash, on the same house.
England and Wales run close together in the middle of the market and then diverge at the top, where Wales's higher-rate table climbs to 17% against England's 17% applied differently — Welsh buyers pay more above roughly £600,000 and less below it.
The pattern to take away is that no nation is simply 'the expensive one'. Scotland is the outlier across the whole range; England and Wales trade places depending on the price.
What this does not cover
These are the standard residential rules. Replacing a main residence, buying with a partner who already owns, inherited shares, mixed-use purchases and corporate buyers all change the answer, and Scotland and Wales each run their own 36-month replacement-and-refund rules on top.
Nothing here is advice on how to reduce a bill. It is a statement of what three published rate tables charge, computed the same way the calculators on this site compute them.
Work out your own
Each nation's calculator takes a price and a buyer type: England & Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All three sit on the UK tax shelf.
Rates as published by HMRC, Revenue Scotland and the Welsh Revenue Authority. Prices from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, standard sales only, through 2026-09-30. This article is market analysis, not tax advice.