Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride has doubled down on his claim that stamp duty should be abolished in order to unlock a ‘bunged up’ property market.
Home buyers must pay stamp duty when they purchase a property and the tax can add thousands – or tens of thousands – to moving costs.
On a £500,000 home, the stamp duty bill is £15,000. On an £800,000 purchase, it is £30,000.
In an upcoming episode of The Property Exchange podcast with estate agency Winkworth, Stride said taxes which do the most economic damage were ‘transactional taxes’.
‘Stamp duty slows down transactions and is bunging up the housing market’, Stride said.
He adds stamp duty costs mean many young people cannot get on the housing ladder as easily as they should do, in part as they have to get a sizeable lump sum together to cover stamp duty.
‘Economically, it means people are less likely to be able to move from where they are to where work is, so there is an impact on the labour market’, Stride added.
> Stamp duty calculator: How much would you pay in tax to move home?
Bumper tax bills: Home buyers must pay stamp duty when they purchase a property and it can add tens of thousands to their moving bills
First-time buyers have a reduced bill on a purchase up to £500,000 and are totally exempt under £300,000. But until April 2025, when Labour axed a first-time buyer tax break, stamp duty only kicked in at £425,000 for new homeowners.
Stride said the burden of stamp duty also meant households were less likely to downsize and free up supply in the market.
He said: ‘If you add all those things up, you end up with a tax that is really doing some economic damage.’
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has previously described stamp duty as ‘one of the most economically damaging taxes’.
In 2024, the think-tank said stamp duty ‘gums up the housing market, keeps people who don’t need them in houses that are too big for them, thus reducing the supply available to growing families; and it serves to reduce labour mobility.’
The Conservatives have vowed to abolish stamp duty for all primary residences.
‘If you want to get taxes down, stamp duty is one of the taxes you have to start with’, Stride said in the podcast.
Home buyers and first-time buyers were hit by a stamp duty rise from 1 April 2025, as Labour opted not to extend a tax break in place since 2022.
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The amount of stamp duty handed over by first-time buyers has more than quadrupled since a holiday from the tax ended, research published last month revealed.
Those buying a starter home paid some £408million in stamp duty land tax since April 2025, up from just £101million in the previous year.
The Treasury has raked in more than half of the stamp duty paid by first-time buyers from just one region, according to property portal Rightmove.
It analysed the number of zero to two bedroom properties sold in England to calculate the amount of stamp duty on starter homes raked in by the Exchequer.
| Band | Stamp duty land tax rate | Additional rate for landlords / second homes |
|---|---|---|
| First-time buyers pay 0% to £300,000 then normal rates apply | ||
| £0 – £125,000 | 0% | 5% |
| £125,001 – £250,000 | 2% | 7% |
| £250,001 – £925,000 | 5% | 10% |
| £925,001 – £1.5m | 10% | 15% |
| £1.5m + | 12% | 17% |
| * No stamp duty is paid on property transactions costing less than £40,000 as these are considered low value and not reported to HMRC | ||
Stamp duty -a brief history of meddling
Stamp duty is payable by those who purchase a property over a certain threshold. It is a complicated tax that has been meddled with repeatedly over the years.
The thresholds at which stamp duty start to be payable have not risen permanently since they were first introduced in 2017.
However, there have been stamp duty holidays, special breaks for first-time buyers and hikes to the rates landlords and second homeowners pay since then.
In July 2020, at the height of the pandemic, then Chancellor Rishi Sunak introduced a stamp duty holiday on the portion of a property purchase price up to £500,000. This ended up running until July 2021, when the break was halved to £250,000. From October 2021, the threshold returned to £125,000.
Then buyers enjoyed lower tax bills between autumn 2022 and April 2025, during which time the starting threshold at which stamp duty is payable was lifted.
Through the lower-rate period, stamp duty wasn’t payable on the first £250,000 of a property for most homeowners in England, but this has now been returned to £125,000. There are varying rates for each chunk of your property’s value.
First-time buyers have a different threshold of £300,000, this was cut from the £425,000 starting level by Rachel Reeves from April 2025. But if first-time buyers purchase a home costing more than £500,000, they lose their break altogether and have the same threshold as other home buyers.
