Stamp Duty on a leasehold flat resale in 2026: no rent charge

Most people buying a flat in England are buying leasehold, and most are buying second-hand. In HM Land Registry's Price Paid data for England there were 117,721 leasehold-flat sales in 2025. Of those, 111,521 — 94.7% — were resales of an existing lease rather than brand-new flats (figures retrieved 12 July 2026). And on a resale, Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) works out more simply than many buyers expect: the rent under the lease is not charged at all. You pay SDLT on the price, and nothing else.

That is the biggest practical difference between buying a new leasehold flat and buying a used one — and it turns on a distinction in the legislation between the grant of a lease and the assignment of a lease.

Grant versus assignment

• A grant is the creation of a brand-new lease — typically a developer granting a 990-year lease on a newly built flat. Stamp duty on the grant of a new lease has two parts: SDLT on any premium (the purchase price), plus a separate charge on the rent, measured by the net present value (NPV) of all the rent due across the term.
• An assignment is the transfer of an existing lease from the current leaseholder to a buyer — the ordinary second-hand flat purchase. Here there is only one part: SDLT on the price. The rent is not charged.

The reason is structural. The SDLT charge on rent (Finance Act 2003, Schedule 5) bites on the grant of a lease. It is a one-off assessment, made once, when the lease first comes into existence. An assignment does not create a new lease — it hands over the one that already exists — so there is no fresh grant to trigger a second rent charge. The rent was measured and taxed (or found to be below the threshold) when the lease was first granted; it is not re-measured each time the flat changes hands.

What you actually pay on a resale

Because only the price is chargeable, SDLT on a leasehold flat resale is calculated on exactly the same residential slab rates as any freehold purchase (HMRC, 2026):

The median leasehold-flat resale in England in 2025 sold for £237,000 (HM Land Registry, retrieved 12 July 2026). At that price:

A first-time buyer pays nothing because £237,000 sits below the £300,000 first-time-buyer nil-rate band that has applied since 1 April 2025. A home mover pays 2% on the slice between £125,000 and £237,000, which is £2,240. Neither figure includes any element for the rent — on a resale there isn't one.

For contrast, the median new-build leasehold flat — the closest proxy for a freshly granted lease — sold for £400,000 in 2025, on which the standard SDLT is £10,000 (2.50%), before any separate rent-NPV element the grant might carry.

The narrow exception

There is one situation where an assignment is treated as though it were a grant, and the rent charge can reappear. Under Finance Act 2003 Schedule 17A, paragraph 11, where a lease was originally granted under certain reliefs — for example sale-and-leaseback relief, or various group, charity and public-body reliefs — the first assignment of that lease that is not itself exempt is treated as the grant of a new lease. The buyer then picks up the rent-NPV charge the original tenant's relief had set aside.

This is a specialist provision. It rarely touches an ordinary buyer of a second-hand residential flat, where the original grant was a normal taxable event and no relief was in play. But it is why a conveyancer checks how the lease was first granted, not just what you are paying for it.

Ground rent is fading anyway

Even on the grant side, the rent element has been shrinking. The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 restricted ground rent on most new residential long leases to a peppercorn (effectively zero) from 30 June 2022. So for a modern lease the rent NPV is usually negligible even at grant — and on any later resale it is not charged at all. Older leases with escalating ground rents are where the rent once mattered for tax; on their resale, that history is behind you for SDLT purposes.

Do you still have to tell HMRC?

Yes — but as an ordinary purchase, not because of the rent. A residential purchase is notifiable to HMRC once the chargeable consideration reaches £40,000 (Finance Act 2003, s77A), the same £40,000 line that appears on a transfer of equity. Nearly every flat resale is well above that, so a land-transaction return is filed and any tax paid within 14 days of completion. The point is simply that there is no additional, rent-based return on an assignment.

The bottom line

Buying an existing leasehold flat is, for stamp duty, a price-only calculation — the same sums a freehold buyer runs. The rent under the lease was assessed once, at grant, and is not charged again when the flat is sold on. It helps to understand the difference between freehold and leasehold before running your own figures.

You can model the SDLT on any price with the stamp duty calculator, or look up what flats have actually sold for on a given street — for example Manchester's M1 postcode, one of England's busiest flat markets. More cost breakdowns are in the cost intelligence guides.

This article is general information about how Stamp Duty Land Tax works, not tax or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.