Key takeaways
- On the UK average home of £273,000 in July 2026, a same-price move in England costs £9,329 in stamp duty, agency commission and the registration fee. That is 3.42% of the price.
- The same £9,329 is 34.2% of a 10% deposit. Transaction costs are quoted against the price, but they come out of the equity.
- Stamp duty land tax on a £273,000 home went from £1,150 to £3,650 on 1 April 2025, when the nil-rate band dropped from £250,000 to £125,000.
- Spread over the 8.9 years a mortgaged owner occupier stays put, the round trip works out at 0.38 percentage points a year.
- HMRC took £10,380 million of residential stamp duty across 1,049,600 transactions in 2024 to 2025. The £9,889 average is 2.7 times the bill on an average-priced house.
The cost of moving house, itemised: £9,329 on a £273,000 home
You want a number before you start, not after. Here's the arithmetic on the average UK home.
The average price of a property in the UK was £273,000 in July 2026, on the Land Registry and ONS index. Take a household selling at that price in England and buying at that price in England. Three costs can be looked up exactly:
- Stamp duty land tax on the purchase: £3,650. Nothing on the first £125,000, 2% on the next £125,000, 5% on the last £23,000.
- Estate agency commission on the sale: £5,529. This one is an estimate, and the section below explains where it comes from and why it's the weakest line in the table.
- HM Land Registry fee to register the transfer: £150 for a property in the £200,001 to £500,000 band, lodged through the portal. By post it's £330.
Total: £9,329, or 3.42% of the price. Conveyancing, searches, a survey, removals and any mortgage product fee sit on top, and no official statistic publishes what those cost. So treat £9,329 as a floor, not a full bill.
Almost none of it is recoverable. You can't sell a stamp duty receipt.
Stamp duty land tax is the one line you can look up exactly
Stamp duty land tax is the buyer's tax on a residential purchase in England and Northern Ireland, charged in slices like income tax. As the bands stood in September 2026, the first £125,000 is free, the portion from £125,001 to £250,000 is taxed at 2%, from £250,001 to £925,000 at 5%, from £925,001 to £1.5 million at 10%, and anything above that at 12%.
Those bands are new. From 31 October 2024 to 31 March 2025 the nil-rate band was £250,000, not £125,000. On a £273,000 purchase that meant 5% on the £23,000 above the threshold and nothing else: £1,150. The same purchase now carries £3,650. The bill on an average-priced English home more than tripled on 1 April 2025, and nothing about the house changed.
First-time buyers are treated differently. There's no stamp duty land tax up to £300,000, and 5% on the portion from £300,001 to £500,000. So a first-time buyer at £273,000 pays nothing at all, while the family moving up the road pays £3,650. The first-time buyer threshold was £425,000 until 31 March 2025, so that relief narrowed on the same day.
Buying an additional home rather than replacing one adds 5% on top of the standard rates, applied to the whole price. On £273,000 that's £13,650 of surcharge, taking the tax to £17,300.
The same £273,000 house is taxed three different ways
Move the house to Scotland or Wales and the tax changes, because the tax itself is different. Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, on bands unchanged since 1 April 2021. Wales charges Land Transaction Tax, on main residential bands unchanged since 10 October 2022.
The chart above runs the same £273,000 purchase through all three, plus the additional-property versions. In England it's £3,650. In Scotland, where the nil-rate band is £145,000 and the 5% band starts at £250,001, it's £3,250. In Wales, where nothing is charged below £225,000 and the next slice is taxed at 6%, it's £2,880. A first-time buyer in England pays £0.
The surcharges are where the regimes part company. England adds 5% of the price. Scotland's Additional Dwelling Supplement has been 8% for transactions on or after 5 December 2024. The same £273,000 second home is taxed at £17,300 in England and £25,090 in Scotland. One house, one price, and £25,090 between the cheapest and the dearest outcome on the chart.
HMRC's average stamp duty bill is 2.7 times the bill on an average house
Here's a gap worth reconciling. In the financial year 2024 to 2025, HMRC's own statistics report residential stamp duty receipts of £10,380 million across 1,049,600 residential transactions. Divide one by the other and the average residential transaction carried £9,889 of stamp duty.
But we just worked out that an average-priced English house carries £3,650. The average bill is 2.7 times the bill on the average house. Both numbers are right, and the gap is the whole point.
Two things pull the mean up. The first is additional-property buyers: 211,700 transactions were subject to the higher-rates surcharge in 2024 to 2025, raising £2,790 million, which is £13,179 of surcharge each before any base tax. The second is price dispersion. The average London property was £550,037 in July 2026, against £166,943 in the North East. Stamp duty on the London figure is £17,502. On the North East figure it's £839. A progressive tax on a market this unequal produces a mean that describes almost nobody.
Relief pulls the other way. First-time buyers' relief applied to 155,400 transactions in 2024 to 2025, relieving an estimated £772 million, and HMRC reports that "nationally, the average amount relieved per transaction was £5,000".
Nobody publishes what an estate agent charges, so here's the closest thing
Estate agent fees are the largest single line in a mover's bill, and there is no official statistic for them. HMRC publishes stamp duty to the nearest million. The registry publishes a fee scale. For agency commission, the best public evidence is a listed agency's own accounts.
Foxtons Group PLC reported average revenue per sales transaction of £11,139 in the half year ended 30 June 2026, down 1% on £11,290. Set that against the average London property price of £550,037 and the implied rate is 2.03% of price. Apply that ratio to £273,000 and you get £5,529, which is the agency line in the table above.
That number carries real assumptions, and they're worth stating. Foxtons sells in London and Surrey, not nationally. Its revenue per sales transaction isn't a pure commission figure. And its properties aren't sold at the London average. A national average agency fee could be materially below 2.03%, and online agents charge fixed fees that bear no relation to price at all. This is the one line in the £9,329 that isn't verifiable from a statutory source, and it's 59% of the total.
The absence itself is informative. Housing transaction costs are the largest fee most households ever pay, and the biggest component of them isn't measured by anyone. Fund investors get an expense ratio published to two decimal places. The largest fee most households pay isn't published at all.
The cost is small against the price and large against the deposit
3.42% of the price sounds survivable. Against the deposit it isn't.
A buyer putting 10% down on a £273,000 home commits £27,300 of equity. The £9,329 round trip is 34.2% of that. At a 25% deposit of £68,250 it's 13.7%. The house is bought with borrowed money, but the transaction costs are paid in cash, so the leverage that flatters the return does nothing for the fees. That asymmetry runs through mortgage leverage generally: the multiplier applies to the price movement and not to the costs.
The cost of moving house also scales with price faster than proportionally, because stamp duty is progressive. Run the same three lines across four English price points and the round trip comes to £4,320 in the North East at £166,943 (2.59% of price), £9,329 at the UK average (3.42%), £10,734 at the England average of £293,000 (3.66%), and £28,936 in London at £550,037 (5.26%). Moving in London costs roughly twice as much, as a share of price, as moving in the North East.
Spread over an 8.9-year tenure it is 0.38 percentage points a year
A one-off cost is only meaningful against a holding period. The English Housing Survey for 2024-25 reports that owner occupiers had lived in their current home for an average of 17.0 years, that outright owners had been there 23.7 years, and that owner occupiers buying with a mortgage had been there 8.9 years.
Take the mortgagor's 8.9 years. Spreading 3.42% straight-line across it gives 0.38 percentage points a year. Across the full owner-occupier average of 17.0 years it's 0.20 points a year. Either figure is a running cost on a leveraged, undiversified, illiquid asset, and it's the right number to set against a fund's ongoing charge rather than against the purchase price. Those are transaction costs; the true cost of owning a home adds around £92.20 a week of council tax, repairs, improvements and insurance on top, every year the house is held.
What does it buy against? Nationwide's series starts in Q4 1952, when the average UK house cost £1,891. By Q2 2026 it was £278,784, a nominal compound rate of 7.03% a year over 73.5 years. Since Q1 2000 the same series compounds at 4.99% a year. The US looks similar: the Case-Shiller national index stood at 336.663 in June 2026 against a January 2000 base of 100, which is 4.70% a year. In the 12 months to July 2026, though, UK prices rose 1.4%. At that rate a 3.42% round trip consumes about 2.4 years of growth.
One in 3 sales collapses, and the fees do not come back
The £9,329 assumes the move completes. Many don't, and the real cost of moving house has to carry the attempts that fail.
The government's home buying and selling reform roadmap, published on 19 June 2026, states that "around one in 3 transactions fall through, leaving families facing wasted fees" and that "fall-throughs alone cost consumers circa £400 million per annum" against around 1.2 million housing transactions annually. Spread across every transaction, that's roughly £333 of wasted fees per move, before anyone counts the completed ones.
The roadmap also reports that "once an offer is accepted, it takes around 120 days on average to complete", and that "the journey is now around 60% longer than it was in 2007". Four months of exposure, with a one-in-three chance of paying for nothing, is a cost that appears in no fee schedule. It's also the clearest illustration of what illiquidity means in practice, and why housing sits awkwardly beside a portfolio you can sell in a morning.
The counter-case: against 17 years and 5% a year, this is noise
The strongest objection to everything above is that it's a rounding error on the right timescale.
Housing's long-run return isn't just price growth. In the Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick and Taylor dataset of returns since 1870, UK housing returned 5.44% a year in capital gain plus 3.94% in rental income, a 9.38% nominal total across 108 annual observations ending in 2015, against 11.25% for UK equities. US housing returned 3.54% and 5.33% for an 8.87% total, against 11.08% for US equities. Against a 9.38% annual total return, one 3.42% round trip every 8.9 years isn't the thing that decides the outcome.
There's a second objection. A mover is a seller and a buyer at once, and the two sides aren't symmetric. Stamp duty falls on the buyer; agency commission falls on the seller. Someone selling at £273,000 and buying at £273,000 pays both, but a first-time buyer pays no commission and, below £300,000, no tax either. The £9,329 is the cost of a particular transaction, not a toll on everyone in the chain.
And moving isn't an investment decision. A household moves for a job, a school, a birth or a death. The arithmetic here prices the transaction. It can't price the reason for it, and a comparison that ignores the reason is measuring the wrong thing.
What this arithmetic cannot tell you
The limitations run deep enough to name individually.
The agency figure is one London firm's half-year filing, rescaled by an average price its own sales don't track. It's the weakest number in the piece and it's the biggest one. Conveyancing, searches, surveys and removals are missing entirely, because no primary source publishes an average, and their absence makes £9,329 an understatement of unknown size.
The return series have their own problems. Nationwide's index is built from its own mortgage approvals, so cash purchases sit outside it, and its £278,784 for Q2 2026 is £5,784 above the Land Registry figure for July 2026. The Jorda dataset ends in 2015 and its UK housing series starts in 1900, which means a sample containing two world wars and several full credit cycles. Rental income in that dataset is net of costs but before tax, so an owner occupier collects the price leg and consumes rather than banks the rent leg, a distinction the second home total return arithmetic turns on.
The tax figures are a snapshot. Rates moved on 1 April 2025 in England, on 5 December 2024 in Scotland and on 11 December 2024 for the Welsh higher rates, and the £125,000 threshold is a policy choice rather than a fact of nature. Anything in this piece dated to September 2026 is a statement about September 2026.
What would change the conclusion
A nil-rate band back at £250,000 would cut the round trip on an average English home from £9,329 to £6,829, or 2.50% of price. That's a single line in a Budget, and it happened in reverse on 1 April 2025. The tax is the most volatile input in the calculation and the one no household controls.
A published statistic for agency and legal fees would move the number more than any tax change. If the true national agency rate is 1.2% rather than 2.03%, the round trip on the average home falls to about £7,076 and the whole comparison shifts. That statistic could exist, and doesn't.
And if fall-through rates came down from one in 3, the expected cost of a move would fall with no fee changing at all, because the wasted attempts are a real cost paid by people who never complete. The reform roadmap is aimed there rather than at the fee schedule, which suggests the government reads the problem the same way.
The figure to watch isn't the asking price. It's how long you expect to hold. At 8.9 years the round trip costs 0.38 points a year; at 17.0 years it costs 0.20; at 3 years it costs 1.14. The rent vs buy break-even turns on that horizon more than on anything a calculator asks first, and the same is true here. LedgerTouch tracks a property holding alongside the rest of a portfolio, which at least puts that 0.38 on the same page as every other charge you pay.