Every one of England's 295 local authorities has a typical home that already costs enough to push the additional-property stamp duty surcharge past £5,000. In 263 of them, the typical additional-property purchase already crosses £10,000 in surcharge alone. In 80, it passes £20,000. In exactly one, it clears £50,000. The reason is arithmetic rather than geography: the surcharge is a flat 5% of price, with no cap and no discount, so every round number in the tax bill has one specific house price attached to it.
The surcharge doesn't bend, so the maths doesn't either
England's additional-property surcharge adds 5 percentage points to the standard stamp duty rate on any residential purchase that counts as a second property — a buy-to-let, a holiday home, or simply owning more than one home at completion. Unlike the standard bands, which step up in stages (0% to £125,000, then 2% to £250,000, and so on), the surcharge applies from the very first pound of the price, with no threshold of its own and no ceiling (gov.uk: Stamp Duty Land Tax residential property rates).
Homecost checked the mechanism live across four representative prices:
| Price | Standard SDLT | Additional-property SDLT | Surcharge (the difference) |
|---|---|---|---|
| £135,000 | £200 | £6,950 | £6,750 |
| £200,000 | £1,500 | £11,500 | £10,000 |
| £400,000 | £10,000 | £30,000 | £20,000 |
| £1,180,000 | £61,750 | £120,750 | £59,000 |
Calculated via Homecost's stamp duty calculator, 18 September 2026.
Because the surcharge is a constant percentage, it can be solved backwards. A £5,000 surcharge belongs to a £100,000 property. A £10,000 surcharge belongs to £200,000. £20,000 belongs to £400,000. £50,000 belongs to exactly £1,000,000. Every English local authority's typical home price can be measured against those four lines.
Where each line has already been crossed
Homecost compared the 2025 median sale price in each of England's 295 local authorities with a large enough sample of transactions (30 or more Land Registry sales) against the four round-number thresholds:
| Surcharge threshold | Home price needed | Local authorities already there | Share of the 295 | Cheapest to cross it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £5,000 | £100,000 | 295 | 100% | Burnley (£135,000) |
| £10,000 | £200,000 | 263 | 89% | Nottingham (£200,000) |
| £20,000 | £400,000 | 80 | 27% | Bath and North East Somerset (£400,000) |
| £50,000 | £1,000,000 | 1 | 0.3% | Kensington and Chelsea (£1,180,000) |
The £5,000 line is already behind every area in the country — even Burnley, the cheapest of the 295 by 2025 median price at £135,000, carries a £6,750 surcharge on its typical home. The £10,000 line catches all but 32 areas, concentrated in the North East, coastal Lancashire and parts of the Midlands. The £20,000 line is where the map narrows sharply: only 80 areas, mostly in London, the South East and a scattering of cathedral and university cities, clear it. The £50,000 line belongs to one place — Kensington and Chelsea, where the 2025 median of £1,180,000 puts the surcharge alone at £59,000, almost as much as the entire £61,750 a home-mover would already pay in standard stamp duty on the same property, before any surcharge is added.
A £200,000 coincidence
Six local authorities — Nottingham, Chesterfield, Ashfield, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Wigan and Knowsley — recorded a 2025 median sale price of exactly £200,000, putting each one precisely on the £10,000 surcharge line rather than just above or below it. That isn't administrative rounding; it reflects how often sale prices cluster on round numbers in the property market generally. It does mean the same £10,000 tax bill on the same £200,000 purchase recurs across several very different parts of the country.
Who this actually applies to
The surcharge isn't only a tax on landlords. It applies to anyone who, at the point of completion, ends up owning two or more residential properties — a holiday home, a house inherited alongside one already owned, or a new purchase completed before an existing home has sold in a chain. Anyone in that position pays the same flat 5% regardless of why they own a second property.
Check your own number
The figures above are local authority medians, not a valuation of any individual home — a specific property's surcharge depends on its own price, not the area average. Homecost's stamp duty calculator works out the exact figure for standard, first-time buyer and additional-property purchases at any price, and the postcode tool shows recent sales for a specific street, using Burnley — the area where the £5,000 line was crossed by the smallest margin — as a starting point.
This is general information, not advice. Speak to a qualified adviser or conveyancer to confirm the stamp duty due on a specific purchase before proceeding.
These figures are drawn from 754,631 Land Registry residential sales recorded across 295 of England's 296 local authorities in 2025, cross-checked against Homecost's stamp duty calculator on 18 September 2026. For the underlying area-by-area multiple between standard and additional-property stamp duty, see Second Home Stamp Duty: The Area-by-Area Multiple, and for the cash-gap version of the same dataset, Second-Home Stamp Duty Surcharge: Multiple vs Cash Gap. More cost-intelligence coverage is in the Homecost blog.