SDLT holiday saving hotspot – South East homebuyers saved £1.2bn in stamp duty

Research by MoveStreets, the property portal designed for the mobile generation, has revealed just how much money the nation’s homebuyers saved thanks to the stamp duty holiday and which region ranks top for the largest saving.

Last week, the government released its latest house price index providing the first concrete view of the market in September of this year when the curtain finally fell on the stamp duty holiday.

MoveStreets analysed sold price records across 776,189 property transactions to have completed in England during the stamp duty holiday, highlighting how much homebuyers saved in stamp duty and where they saved the most.

Regional Stamp Duty Holiday Saving
In total across England, the stamp duty holiday saved the nation’s homebuyers a staggering £4.6bn.

The South East was the nation’s SDLT holiday saving hotspot. 147,010 property transactions completed during the holiday, the most of any region, saving homebuyers a huge £1.2bn in tax.

London ranks second, the only other region to see a SDLT holiday saving of over £1bn (£1.020bn), while homebuyers across the East of England (£678m) and South West (£562m) also saw the total saving exceed half a billion pounds.

The North West completes the top five with a saving of £301m having also seen the second largest number of transactions complete during this period.

The North East was home to the lowest saving, but even still, homebuyers benefited to the tune of £66m.

Largest Saving by Local/Unitary Authority
On a more granular level, Buckinghamshire ranks top. Homebuyers in the area saved £85.2m during the stamp duty holiday, while Wandsworth (£65.9m), Bromley (£60.4m), Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (£53m) and Cornwall (£52.9m) also rank amongst the areas to have enjoyed the largest stamp duty holiday savings in the nation.

Adam Kamani, CEO and Co-Founder property portal of MoveStreets, commented:

“Now that the dust has finally settled on the stamp duty holiday we’re finally getting some insight into just how much homebuyers saved on their property purchases and the figures are quite tremendous.

To think that nearly five billion pounds were saved over the full duration of the holiday is mind boggling and there’s no doubt that it helped energise the market during a tough period of wider COVID uncertainty.

Of course, many may now be feeling a little sick at the thought of having to pay stamp duty and it really does highlight how much the government pockets from hard-pressed homebuyers, particularly when they’re doing little to help in addressing the housing crisis itself.”

Data sourced from the Land Registry Price Paid data set of property transactions across England and Wales 8th July 2020 to September 2021. PPD category A, single residential property sold for value and excluding property types listed as ‘other’.