Ask what first-time buyer relief is worth in the UK, and the honest answer is: it depends which side of two borders you're buying on. England, Wales and Scotland each tax property purchases under a different transaction tax — Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT), Land Transaction Tax (LTT) and Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) — and each government made a different choice about whether, and how, to soften the bill for someone buying their first home. The result is three genuinely different policies built for the same stated goal: worth up to £5,000 in England, capped at £600 in Scotland, and worth precisely nothing in Wales.
England: a wide nil-rate band with a hard cliff
Since 1 April 2025, a first-time buyer in England pays no SDLT on the first £300,000 of a main residence, then 5% on the slice between £300,001 and £500,000. Above £500,000 the relief is withdrawn entirely and the buyer pays exactly what any other mover pays, taxed from £0 under the standard bands (HMRC, 2026). That design puts a ceiling on the saving: because it can never be worth more than 5% of a £200,000 band, the maximum cash value is £5,000, however expensive the home. We've mapped what that ceiling is worth city by city in what first-time buyer relief is worth across UK cities.
Wales: no relief at all
Wales replaced SDLT with LTT in April 2018 and did not carry any first-time buyer discount across into the new tax (Welsh Government, LTT rates and bands). A first-time buyer and a home mover pay exactly the same LTT at every price — 0% to £225,000, then 6% to £400,000, 7.5% to £750,000, and higher bands above that. There is no separate first-time buyer table to look up, because Wales never built one. What that means for someone weighing Cardiff against a similarly sized English city is set out in the Wales-England first-time buyer crossover.
Scotland: a narrower band, but no cliff
Scotland's LBTT relief works differently again. It raises the nil-rate threshold for first-time buyers from £145,000 to £175,000 — a £30,000 wider 0% band than a mover gets (Revenue Scotland, LBTT rates and bands). Because the saving is fixed at 2% of that £30,000 gap, it tops out at £600 — far below England's £5,000 ceiling. But unlike England, Scotland's relief carries no upper price limit on eligibility: a first-time buyer paying £600,000 gets the same £600 off their bill as one paying £200,000. There is no cliff. The saving simply reaches its maximum at £175,000 and stays there at every higher price.
The same price, three different bills
The table below applies each nation's rules to the same set of prices, comparing what a home mover pays with what an eligible first-time buyer pays.
| Price | England mover / FTB | England saves | Wales mover / FTB | Wales saves | Scotland mover / FTB | Scotland saves |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £150,000 | £500 / £0 | £500 | £0 / £0 | £0 | £100 / £0 | £100 |
| £200,000 | £1,500 / £0 | £1,500 | £0 / £0 | £0 | £1,100 / £500 | £600 |
| £225,000 | £2,000 / £0 | £2,000 | £0 / £0 | £0 | £1,600 / £1,000 | £600 |
| £300,000 | £5,000 / £0 | £5,000 | £4,500 / £4,500 | £0 | £4,600 / £4,000 | £600 |
| £400,000 | £10,000 / £5,000 | £5,000 | £10,500 / £10,500 | £0 | £13,350 / £12,750 | £600 |
| £500,000 | £15,000 / £10,000 | £5,000 | £18,000 / £18,000 | £0 | £23,350 / £22,750 | £600 |
| £600,000 | £20,000 / £20,000 | £0 | £25,500 / £25,500 | £0 | £33,350 / £32,750 | £600 |
At £300,000 — close to the England and Wales medians — a first-time buyer saves £5,000 in England, £600 in Scotland, and nothing at all in Wales, despite the underlying tax being broadly similar size in all three nations. Push the price to £600,000 and England's relief has already disappeared over the cliff, while Scotland's £600 saving is still there, completely unchanged from what it was at £200,000.
Where most buyers actually sit
Relief only matters if buyers are transacting near the thresholds it is built around. Of 742,328 standard residential sales in England in 2025, 50.3% were at or below £300,000 — where relief, for an eligible buyer, wipes out the SDLT bill entirely — and 18.9% were above £500,000, where the relief has already disappeared. In Wales, 53.7% of 40,226 sales in 2025 were at or below the £225,000 nil-rate band, where there was no LTT to relieve in the first place, quite apart from the fact that no first-time buyer discount exists there at all (HM Land Registry, Price Paid Data, fetched 2026-09-05). Scotland does not appear in this dataset — Land Registry price-paid data covers only England and Wales, with Scottish sales recorded separately by Registers of Scotland — so the Scottish figures above are the statutory rates applied to representative prices, not a sales-weighted average. How the three tax regimes intersect more broadly, including the prices where one nation becomes cheaper than another, is set out in how SDLT, LTT and LBTT compare.
Why the designs differ so much
England's cliff exists because the relief is aimed at buyers priced out at the entry level, not at subsidising higher-value purchases — a trade-off examined in why first-time buyer relief is capped but the additional-property surcharge isn't. Scotland took the opposite trade-off: a much smaller maximum saving, but one available to a first-time buyer at any price. Wales took a third path, deciding not to build a separate first-time buyer track into LTT at all.
None of this determines what any individual buyer will actually pay. Eligibility depends on whether every buyer on the transaction has ever owned residential property anywhere in the world, and whether the home is being bought as an only or main residence — a conveyancer confirms eligibility on completion. This is general information, not advice, and thresholds change. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.
Check your own price
Test any of these figures, or your own purchase price, in the stamp duty calculator with first-time buyer relief applied, or see the full cost picture behind a real address such as CF24 3AA in Cardiff. For more on how the UK's transaction taxes compare, browse cost intelligence guides.
Based on live HMRC, Welsh Government and Revenue Scotland rate tables, and 782,554 HM Land Registry transactions across England and Wales in 2025. See how we source our data.