Buy a £333,000 home to live in and it makes no difference whether you're in England or Scotland — both charge exactly £6,650.00 in property transaction tax, to the penny. Buy that same £333,000 property as a second home or a rental instead, and the tie disappears: Scotland's Additional Dwelling Supplement pushes the bill to £33,290.00, while England's stays at £23,300.00 — a gap of £9,990.00 that didn't exist a moment before the surcharge was applied.
Homecost has previously mapped the three exact prices where standard-rate stamp duty, Land Transaction Tax and Land and Buildings Transaction Tax cross over between England, Wales and Scotland, and separately shown how each nation's additional-property surcharge is built. Putting the two together answers a question neither piece settled on its own: what happens to those crossover prices once the buyer is purchasing a second home rather than their only one? Figures below are from Homecost's stamp duty engine, run live against the rate tables in force in 2026, fetched 2026-09-10.
The three standard-rate crossovers, recapped
| Regime pair | Crossover price | Tax in both regimes (standard rate) |
|---|---|---|
| England (SDLT) vs Wales (LTT) | £350,000 | £7,500.00 |
| England (SDLT) vs Scotland (LBTT) | £333,000 | £6,650.00 |
| Wales (LTT) vs Scotland (LBTT) | £310,000 | £5,100.00 |
These are single-buyer, standard-rate figures — no first-time buyer relief, no additional-property surcharge. Run the same three prices with the surcharge switched on (England and Wales's additional-dwelling surcharge, Scotland's Additional Dwelling Supplement) and the picture splits in two.
England vs Wales: the tie holds exactly
| Price | England total | Wales total | Tied? |
|---|---|---|---|
| £300,000 | £20,000.00 | £19,500.00 | No — Wales £500 cheaper |
| £350,000 | £25,000.00 | £25,000.00 | Yes — exact |
| £400,000 | £30,000.00 | £30,500.00 | No — England £500 cheaper |
£350,000 is still the crossover, to the penny, with the surcharge applied. That's not a second coincidence — it's algebra. England and Wales both add a flat 5 percentage points of the full price from the first pound. Adding the identical percentage to both sides of a bill that was already tied doesn't change which side is bigger, so the crossover can't move. The same logic explains why Wales stays cheaper below £350,000 and England stays cheaper above it, in both the standard-rate and surcharge-adjusted versions — the ranking either side of the crossover is unchanged, just the gap is wider.
England vs Scotland, and Wales vs Scotland: the crossover disappears
Scotland's surcharge is 8 percentage points, not 5 — three points higher than England's or Wales's. Applied to the same two crossover prices, the result isn't a smaller gap. It's no tie at all:
| Regime pair | Price | Total A | Total B | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| England vs Scotland | £333,000 | £23,300.00 (Eng) | £33,290.00 (Scot) | £9,990.00 |
| Wales vs Scotland | £310,000 | £20,600.00 (Wales) | £29,900.00 (Scot) | £9,300.00 |
Checking the full price ladder shows this isn't a local effect near those two prices — it holds everywhere:
| Price | England (2nd home) | Wales (2nd home) | Scotland (2nd home) |
|---|---|---|---|
| £50,000 | £2,500.00 | £2,500.00 | £4,000.00 |
| £150,000 | £8,000.00 | £7,500.00 | £12,100.00 |
| £300,000 | £20,000.00 | £19,500.00 | £28,600.00 |
| £500,000 | £40,000.00 | £43,000.00 | £63,350.00 |
| £1,000,000 | £93,750.00 | £111,750.00 | £158,350.00 |
Homecost tested prices from £1,000 up to £1,000,000. Scotland's total is higher than both England's and Wales's at every single one. England and Wales still swap places with each other above and below £350,000, exactly as before — but neither one is ever overtaken by Scotland.
The reason is proportional rather than structural. Scotland's standard-rate advantage over England and Wales — the thing that made it the cheapest of the three below £310,000–£333,000 for an ordinary home-mover — was worth at most a few hundred pounds even at its widest point. Three extra percentage points of surcharge on the full price outweighs that almost immediately: 3% of £150,000 alone is £4,500, dwarfing any saving Scotland's standard rate ever offered at that price. Once the surcharge is in the calculation, Scotland's higher rate — not its band structure — decides the outcome, and it decides it the same way at every price.
Who this affects
The surcharge isn't limited to landlords. It applies to anyone who will own more than one residential property at the end of the day they complete — a couple buying a holiday home, someone who buys a home before selling an existing one, or a person who inherits a property and later buys one to live in. Whether a specific purchase counts as an "additional" dwelling depends on individual circumstances and can involve reliefs or refunds not covered here.
These figures compare the tax bill only. They say nothing about which nation is the better place to buy a second home or a rental property once purchase price, rental yield, mortgage cost and running costs are weighed together — that's a decision for the buyer, not a ranking this piece makes.
Run your own numbers
The stamp duty calculator runs all three regimes side by side for any price and either buyer type — worth checking directly rather than reading a fixed number off a table, since the exact figures move whenever a government updates its rate card. For the full four-nation standard-rate comparison, see Homecost's SDLT vs LBTT vs LTT guide; CF10 1AA in central Cardiff is a starting point for checking a specific address near the England-Wales border. More stamp duty and cost breakdowns are in Homecost's cost-intelligence guides.
This is general information about how each tax works, not advice on where or when to buy a second property. Speak to a qualified conveyancer or tax adviser before acting.