Where first-time buyers pay no stamp duty in England (2026)

First-time buyer stamp duty relief reads like one simple national rule: buy your first home for £300,000 or less and you pay nothing. But "£300,000 or less" means very different things in different parts of the country. In 145 of the 295 English councils with enough recorded sales to measure — 49% — a first-time buyer purchasing at the local median price pays £0 in stamp duty. In another 118 they get partial relief. And in 32, including every single London borough, the typical home is priced high enough that the relief is worth nothing at all.

Those figures come from 720,619 residential sales logged by HM Land Registry across England in 2025, sorted by council and matched against the current stamp duty thresholds (data fetched 18 July 2026). The pattern is stark: the same relief that covers a whole purchase in the North East runs out before it reaches a single postcode in the capital.

How first-time buyer relief works in 2026

Since April 2025, a first-time buyer purchasing their only or main home pays:

• 0% on the price up to £300,000
• 5% on any amount between £300,001 and £500,000
• and no relief at all if the price is above £500,000, where the standard rates apply instead.

A home mover with no relief pays the standard scale: 0% to £125,000, 2% up to £250,000, then 5% up to £925,000.

These thresholds tightened on 1 April 2025, when the temporary higher first-time buyer allowances that had run since September 2022 (a £425,000 nil-rate band and a £625,000 ceiling) expired and reverted to the £300,000 and £500,000 figures. The reversion pulled a swathe of typical purchases — concentrated in the South East — back out of full relief.

The practical effect is that first-time buyer relief is worth a flat £5,000 — the value of the extra nil-rate band — right up to £500,000, and then disappears in a single step:

At £500,000 a first-time buyer pays £10,000; at £500,001 the relief vanishes and the bill steps up to around £15,000 — a £5,000 jump for a £1 difference in price. Our guide to how the £300,000-to-£500,000 taper is calculated works through the arithmetic, and how first-time buyer stamp duty relief works covers the eligibility rules. This is general information, not advice: whether a buyer qualifies as a first-time buyer depends on their circumstances and is confirmed on completion.

Half of England: the relief lands in full

Group every English council by type and the geography of the £300,000 threshold falls out clearly — where it bites, and where it sails clean over the local market:

Read down the "FTB pays £0" column and the story is plain. The relief was written for a £300,000 country — and roughly half of England still is one.

Where relief reaches everyone: the big-city districts

England's 36 metropolitan districts — the boroughs that make up Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear — are where first-time buyer relief works exactly as intended. In 33 of the 36 (92%), the 2025 median sale sits at or below £300,000, so a first-time buyer at the typical local price pays nothing. Sunderland is the cheapest at a £155,000 median; Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool all clear the threshold comfortably. Only three metropolitan districts push a median first-time buyer into the taper — Trafford (£370,000), Solihull (£330,000) and Stockport (£310,000) — and none loses the relief altogether. You can see the full buying cost on any Manchester postcode for a worked metropolitan-district example. The wider picture across all 36 is set out in our first-time buyer stamp duty map for the English metropolitan districts.

Coin-toss country: unitaries and shire districts

The 62 unitary authorities split about six to four: 38 (61%) leave a median first-time buyer paying £0, 23 fall in the taper, and just one — Windsor and Maidenhead, at a £545,000 median — is priced clean out of the relief. The full breakdown is in our unitary-authority relief guide.

England's 164 shire districts are the most finely balanced group of all. Here the taper band dominates: 74 districts sit under £300,000, 81 land in the £300,000–£500,000 partial-relief zone, and 9 lose relief entirely. Both the floor and the ceiling of English house prices live in this group — Burnley, in Pennine Lancashire, has the cheapest median of any English district at £135,000, while nine districts in the Surrey–Hertfordshire–Essex commuter belt have medians above £500,000. Add Windsor and Maidenhead and these are the ten places outside London where a median-priced home leaves a first-time buyer with no relief at all:

Eight of the nine shire districts ring London to the south and north; only Epping Forest sits to the east. The full shire-district relief map has the rest.

Where the relief runs out: London

London is the clean exception to everything above. Not one of its 33 boroughs has a 2025 median at or below £300,000 — so nowhere in the capital does a first-time buyer at the typical price pay nothing. The cheapest borough, Barking and Dagenham, has a £382,000 median, which already carries a £4,100 first-time buyer bill.

Eleven boroughs keep some relief, their medians landing in the £300,000–£500,000 taper:

The other 22 boroughs — two-thirds of the capital — have medians above £500,000, from Redbridge and Hillingdon at £510,000 up to Kensington and Chelsea at £1,150,000. In all of them the relief is worth nothing: a first-time buyer pays exactly what a home mover pays. Our companion piece on the cheapest London boroughs for first-time buyers drills into where the entry points are.

The threshold is national; prices are local

The takeaway isn't that the relief is set too low or too high — it is that a single UK-wide threshold lands unevenly on a country whose house prices span an order of magnitude. A £5,000 saving that covers an entire first purchase in Sunderland, Burnley or Hull counts for nothing against a £700,000 completion in Richmond or Camden, where the relief does not reach.

As a rough guide, the council type signals which relief band the typical local home falls into: metropolitan districts almost always leave a median first-time buyer paying £0; unitary and shire districts are roughly an even split; and in London the median home is usually priced out of the relief entirely, apart from the cheaper eastern and outer-southern boroughs. To see exactly where any street sits — stamp duty, mortgage at the current Bank of England quoted rate, council tax and energy in one view — try a postcode on the Homecost true-cost tool, or browse more market analysis.

This article explains how the rules work; it is not personal tax advice. First-time buyer eligibility depends on your circumstances and is confirmed on completion. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.

Based on 720,619 HM Land Registry residential transactions across 295 English local authorities in 2025, matched to the 2026 HMRC stamp duty thresholds (data fetched 18 July 2026). Read more on the Homecost blog.