What a Schedule 4A relief is worth: the 17% corporate SDLT saving

When a company buys a single home in England for more than £500,000, the default stamp duty charge is not the familiar progressive ladder — it is a flat 17% of the whole price (Finance Act 2003, Schedule 4A). On a £1,000,000 house that is £170,000. Where a valid Schedule 4A relief applies, the same purchase reverts to the ordinary residential rates plus the 5% additional-dwelling surcharge — £93,750. The relief is worth the difference: £76,250.

That gap is the single largest line-item swing in the cost of a corporate purchase, and it grows with the price — from £52,000 at £600,000 up to a ceiling of £86,250. This piece sets out the arithmetic. It is general information about how the rules work, not advice about any particular purchase.

The 17% flat rate, in one paragraph

Schedule 4A charges a single flat rate on a "non-natural person" — broadly a company, a partnership with a corporate member, or a collective investment scheme — that buys one dwelling costing more than £500,000. The 31 October 2024 Budget lifted that flat rate from 15% to 17% for transactions on or after that date, the same Budget that raised the additional-dwelling surcharge from 3% to 5%. Unlike the standard bands, the 17% applies to the entire consideration, not just the slice above a threshold — which is exactly why it is so much heavier than the ordinary charge. The mechanics, and the full list of reliefs, are set out in our guide to the 17% corporate flat rate and its reliefs.

What a relief actually does

Schedule 4A carves out several business uses where the flat rate does not apply. The main ones are a genuine property-rental business, property development or trading, dwellings opened to the public on a commercial basis, property occupied by qualifying employees, farmhouses, and acquisitions by financial institutions in the course of lending. Where one of these applies, the 17% is switched off and the purchase is taxed the ordinary way — the standard residential rates, plus the 5% additional-property surcharge that a company always pays, because it can never be buying an "only or main residence".

So the cash value of a relief is simply:

17% flat rate − (standard rates + 5% surcharge).

The saving, tabulated

Using HMRC's current England rates (fetched 10 July 2026), here is what a valid relief is worth across the range where the flat rate bites:

Every "standard + 5%" figure in that table is the number the Homecost stamp duty calculator returns for a company purchase (an additional-property acquisition); the 17% column is a straight multiplication of the price.

Two things the table shows

The saving rises with price — then stops. It climbs from £52,000 at £600,000 to £86,250 at £1.5m, then flattens. At £2m it is still £86,250; the same holds at £3m or £10m. The reason is arithmetic: above £1.5m the top standard band is 12%, and adding the 5% surcharge makes the marginal rate on the standard route 17% — identical to the flat rate. Once both routes charge 17% on every extra pound, the gap between them can no longer widen. The value of the relief therefore has a hard ceiling of £86,250, reached at £1.5m.

There is a cliff at £500,000. The flat rate applies only above £500,000, so at or below that price a relief is worth nothing — a company pays standard-plus-surcharge either way (£40,000 on a £500,000 home). One pound over the line, the flat rate switches on, and a relief is suddenly worth roughly £45,000. It is the mirror image of the £500,000 threshold that trips up individual buyers, which we cover in the £500,000 stamp duty cliff edge.

For scale: fewer than one in five English homes sold in 2025 cleared £500,000 (135,625 of 720,610 sales, 18.8%), and only 3.0% cleared £1m (HM Land Registry Price Paid, fetched 10 July 2026). The overwhelming majority of those were bought by individuals, who never meet the flat rate at all — it is a charge aimed squarely at dwellings held inside companies.

The saving is not guaranteed to stick

A relief claimed at completion can be withdrawn if the qualifying use stops within three years. If a director, shareholder or a person connected to them occupies the dwelling during that control period, for example, the relief is clawed back: a further return is due within 30 days and the tax is recomputed at the full 17%. In cash terms the clawback equals the saving in the table above — the £76,250 banked on a £1m purchase is exactly what falls due if the conditions break. The mechanics are set out in our guide to the three-year clawback.

A company holding a dwelling worth more than £500,000 also faces the Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings (ATED), an annual charge that runs alongside the one-off stamp duty. The Schedule 4A reliefs have close ATED equivalents, so the same business use that lifts the 17% flat rate usually relieves the annual charge too — but they are separate returns with separate deadlines.

Where this leaves a corporate buyer

The figures show why the relief question dominates the tax cost of putting a home into a company: on any purchase between £600,000 and £1.5m it is worth between £52,000 and £86,250, and above £1.5m it is fixed at £86,250. But the number in the table is a gross saving that assumes the qualifying conditions are met at completion and held for three years — and it sits on top of ATED, corporation tax, and the connected-company market-value rule that can deem a higher price than was actually paid.

To see the standard-plus-surcharge leg for any price, open the stamp duty calculator with the additional-property flag set, or browse the rest of our cost-intelligence guides. For a sense of the prime-market prices where these purchases cluster, try a central-London postcode such as SW1A 1AA in the Homecost tool.

This is general information about how Schedule 4A works, not tax advice, and the reliefs turn on facts specific to each purchase. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.