A first-time buyer in Wales pays Land Transaction Tax (LTT) with no first-time buyer discount at all — Wales abolished its FTB relief in 2018 and never brought it back. A first-time buyer in England pays nothing on the first £300,000. That structural gap raises an obvious question: is there any purchase price at which the Welsh buyer actually comes out ahead?
We ran both regimes through Homecost's stamp duty engine across the full price range — from £150,000 to £1 million — to find out. The answer is no. The gap never closes. But it does something more interesting: it nearly vanishes at one exact price, then reopens.
The two systems, side by side
England's first-time buyer relief charges 0% up to £300,000, then 5% on the slice between £300,000 and £500,000. Above £500,000, the relief disappears completely — a first-time buyer paying £500,001 or more is taxed on the full standard schedule from £0, the same as any other buyer.
Wales has run no FTB relief since October 2018. A first-time buyer pays the same Land Transaction Tax as anyone buying their only home: 0% up to £225,000, 6% on the next slice to £400,000, 7.5% up to £750,000, then 10% and 12% further up.
What the gap actually looks like
| Price | Wales LTT | England SDLT (FTB) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| £225,000 | £0 | £0 | £0 |
| £250,000 | £1,500 | £0 | £1,500 |
| £300,000 | £4,500 | £0 | £4,500 |
| £350,000 | £7,500 | £2,500 | £5,000 |
| £400,000 | £10,500 | £5,000 | £5,500 |
| £450,000 | £14,250 | £7,500 | £6,750 |
| £500,000 | £18,000 | £10,000 | £8,000 |
| £500,001 | £18,000 | £15,000 | £3,000 |
| £550,000 | £21,750 | £17,500 | £4,250 |
| £700,000 | £33,000 | £25,000 | £8,000 |
| £1,000,000 | £61,750 | £43,750 | £18,000 |
(Figures calculated via the Homecost stamp duty engine, 4 September 2026, region set to Wales/England, first-time buyer flag on for the England column, off for Wales since no such flag exists there.)
Below £225,000, both nations charge nothing, so the gap is genuinely zero for the cheapest end of the market. From there it opens steadily — a Welsh first-time buyer is already £4,500 worse off than an English one at £300,000, purely because England hasn't started charging yet.
The cliff that almost closes it
The gap peaks at exactly £8,000 at a purchase price of £500,000 — the last pound at which England's relief still applies in any form. One pound higher, at £500,001, England's relief disappears entirely and the buyer is taxed from £0 on the standard schedule. That single extra pound adds £5,000 to the English buyer's bill (from £10,000 to £15,000), which mechanically shrinks the Wales-England gap from £8,000 down to £3,000 — the narrowest point on the entire curve.
It is a real cliff, not a smoothing taper: England's relief is a binary switch, not a gradual withdrawal. A buyer at £499,999 keeps the full relief; a buyer at £500,001 loses it outright. Above that point the gap widens again in a straight line — roughly £25 for every extra £1,000 of price — because Wales's marginal LTT rate (7.5% between £400,000 and £750,000) runs higher than England's post-relief marginal SDLT rate (5% between £250,000 and £925,000) once both are back to charging tax from the bottom.
Nowhere on the curve does the gap turn negative. A Welsh first-time buyer never pays less tax than an equivalent English one at the same price — the £500,000 cliff narrows the gap sharply, but it doesn't close it, let alone reverse it.
Who this actually affects
Land Registry data shows 40,226 residential sales in Wales in 2025 (category A, arm's-length sales). Of those:
- 53.7% sold at £225,000 or under — both nations charge £0, so the FTB gap is moot for the majority of the Welsh market.
- 21.2% sold between £225,001 and £300,000 — this is where the gap opens fastest in percentage terms, since England is still at £0 while Wales is already charging up to £4,500.
- 19.7% sold between £300,001 and £500,000 — both nations are taxing, and the gap widens steadily to its £8,000 peak.
- 5.3% sold above £500,000 — the minority of the market that actually crosses England's relief cliff.
For a Cardiff flat around today's typical local sale price — the terraced houses on The Parade in CF24 last changed hands for £230,000 to £250,000 — a first-time buyer sits right in the fastest-widening part of the gap: Welsh LTT of £1,500–£1,875 against zero SDLT across the border for an equivalent-priced English purchase. Try the postcode tool on CF24 3AA to see current listings and the True Cost breakdown for that area.
Why the relief design matters more than the tax rate
The reason Wales never overtakes England isn't that Welsh tax rates are dramatically higher — the standard-rate bands are broadly comparable in shape to England's. It's that England's relief is a genuine giveaway on the first £300,000 of every first-time purchase, while Wales collects tax on the same slice as everyone else. A flat-rate system without a carve-out will always lag a system that carves out the price band where most first-time buyers actually shop, and the £500,000 cliff is a reminder that reliefs built as thresholds rather than tapers tend to produce these sharp discontinuities rather than smooth ones.
You can run your own price through both regimes on the stamp duty calculator, or compare all four UK nations at once on the SDLT vs LTT vs LBTT crossover guide. For the wider picture of where Wales and England diverge above £400,000 for buyers who already own a home, see Wales vs England Stamp Duty: the cost gap above £400,000, and for the fuller first-time-buyer comparison at specific Welsh cities, see what a Welsh first-time buyer pays that an English one wouldn't. More cost-intelligence pieces are on the Homecost blog.
This is general information about how the two tax systems are structured, not advice on which one applies to your purchase or when you count as a first-time buyer under either regime. Speak to a qualified adviser or conveyancer before acting on any of the figures above.