HMRC's deliberate defaulter list: the £25,000 SDLT threshold (2026)
This is general information about how the rules work, not tax or legal advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.
Most buyers know that getting a tax return wrong can mean paying the tax back, plus a penalty, plus interest. Fewer know that, in a narrow set of cases, there is a fourth consequence: a person's name, address and the amount involved can be published on a public list on GOV.UK for up to a year.
The power sits in section 94 of the Finance Act 2009 and it applies to stamp duty land tax (SDLT) exactly as it applies to income tax or VAT. But it is deliberately narrow. Two conditions must both be met before HMRC can publish anything — and for a typical residential purchase, one of them is not crossed until the price is well into six figures.
The two gates
Under section 94, HMRC may publish a person's details only where both of the following are true:
- The person has incurred a penalty for a deliberate inaccuracy or failure — not a careless one; and
- The tax at stake — HMRC's term is the "potential lost revenue" — is more than £25,000.
Miss either condition and publication is off the table. A careless error, however large, is never published. A deliberate error is never published if the tax involved is £25,000 or less. Both gates, together, every time. The word the statute uses is may, not must: even where both conditions are met, publication is a discretion HMRC exercises, not an automatic result.
That £25,000 figure is measured against the tax, not the price of the property, and it has stood at the same level since the regime began.
Where the £25,000 line falls for stamp duty
The largest single SDLT figure most buyers could wrongly avoid is the additional-property surcharge — now a flat 5% of the whole price on a second home or buy-to-let. One argument people sometimes use to try to escape it is that the property was "non-residential", so the flat commercial scale (0% up to £150,000, 2% to £250,000, 5% above) applies instead. If that argument is wrong and the return was made deliberately, the potential lost revenue is the gap between what was paid on the non-residential scale and what was actually due on the residential additional-property scale.
The figures below use the residential additional-property rates from the stamp duty calculator (England) against the non-residential scale, fetched 24 July 2026:
| Purchase price | Residential (additional property) | Non-residential scale | Potential lost revenue | Over the £25,000 line? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £250,000 | £15,000 | £2,000 | £13,000 | No |
| £400,000 | £30,000 | £9,500 | £20,500 | No |
| £490,000 | £39,000 | £14,000 | £25,000 | No — it must exceed £25,000 |
| £500,000 | £40,000 | £14,500 | £25,500 | Yes |
| £600,000 | £50,000 | £19,500 | £30,500 | Yes |
The potential lost revenue on this kind of reclaim rises by 5% of the purchase price, and it passes £25,000 at a purchase price of about £490,000. Below that, even a deliberate surcharge reclaim cannot put a name on the list, because the tax at stake is too small to clear the second gate. Above it, in principle, it can.
For context: of the 759,637 residential sales completed in England and Wales in 2025 (HM Land Registry price-paid data, standard full-market sales), about 145,751 — roughly one in five — were above £490,000. So the price band where a deliberate surcharge default could cross the publication threshold is real, but far from typical. And that band is an upper bound, not a headcount: most of those purchases are not additional-property buys, and the overwhelming majority of stamp duty errors are not deliberate at all.
Careless is never published — however big the number
The first gate turns entirely on behaviour, not on the size of the mistake. HMRC's penalty rules for inaccurate returns (Schedule 24 to the Finance Act 2007) sort errors into three culpability levels: reasonable care (no penalty), careless, and deliberate. Only the deliberate category can ever lead to publication.
The practical effect is stark. Someone who under-declares £100,000 of SDLT through a careless error faces the tax, a careless penalty and interest — but not the list. Someone who deliberately under-declares £30,000 can be published. This is why the line between a careless and a deliberate error matters far more than the amount involved. "Deliberate", in this context, carries the meaning the courts have given it — an intention to mislead HMRC — a test explored in the Tooth deliberate-behaviour case.
What gets published, and for how long
Section 94 sets out what HMRC may publish: the person's name (including any trading name), their address, the nature of any business, the amount of the tax and the penalties, and the periods involved. It is a factual entry rather than a narrative account of what happened.
Before anything appears, HMRC must tell the person it is considering publication and give them a reasonable opportunity to make representations first. Any entry that is published stays online for a maximum of 12 months and must then be removed. HMRC maintains the current list on GOV.UK under "deliberate tax defaulters".
The disclosure that keeps a name off the list
There is one route out written into the regime, and it rewards coming forward early. Where a person makes a full, unprompted disclosure and earns the maximum available reduction of the penalty for the quality of that disclosure, HMRC will not publish their details. A prompted disclosure — one made only after HMRC has already begun asking questions — does not carry the same protection: it can reduce the penalty, but it does not switch off publication.
HMRC explains this in its Compliance Handbook (the CH190000 series) and in factsheet CC/FS13. The upshot is that the person who comes forward first, before any enquiry, and sets out the full picture is treated very differently from the person who only concedes once HMRC is already on the case — even where the tax at stake is identical.
The bigger picture
Publication is the fourth and rarest layer of exposure on a stamp duty default, sitting on top of the tax, the penalty and the interest. It is reserved for a narrow tail: deliberate conduct, more than £25,000 of tax, and no protective unprompted disclosure. For the great majority of SDLT errors — careless rather than deliberate, and below the threshold — it simply never arises.
Two sibling explainers cover the layers beneath it: what happens when HMRC overturns a non-residential stamp duty claim, which works through the tax, penalty and interest maths, and the reasonable-care defence to an SDLT penalty, which explains how an honest error made despite proper care attracts no penalty at all — and therefore no risk of publication.
See the numbers for yourself
You can see how the additional-property surcharge builds up on any price with the stamp duty calculator, and check what recent buyers actually paid on a given street with the Homecost postcode tool. More explainers on the cost of buying are in the Cost Intelligence guides.
The publication regime is highly fact-sensitive and turns on findings about a person's behaviour and disclosure. This article explains how the rules are written; it is not a statement about any individual case, and it is not tax or legal advice. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.