The £250,000 wall — and the new £500,000 cliff
Tax thresholds don't just raise money; they bend prices around them. Every wall the Treasury has built is carved into the record of completed sales — including the one being built right now.
For seventeen years, crossing £250,000 by a single pound cost a buyer roughly £5,000 in extra stamp duty. So sales piled up at exactly £250,000 — 18 per 1,000 of all completions through 2005–2013 — while the £10,000 of price space just above it was a desert (5.2 per 1,000). The December 2014 reform demolished that wall almost overnight (today: 13 per 1,000). Now a new one is rising: since first-time-buyer relief began vanishing above £500,000 in April 2025, sales just below that line run at 4.1× the rate of sales just above it.
First-time-buyer relief applies only below £500,000 since April 2025 — crossing the line costs a first-time buyer thousands at once, and the deals visibly bunch beneath it. The same mechanics are widely reported around the proposed £2m “mansion tax” — this is what that wall will look like in the data.
Methodology & use
Counts of standard market sales at exact price points and in £4,000–£5,000 bands around each threshold, as a share of all completions that year, from the full HM Land Registry Price Paid record for England & Wales (2000 onwards). No modelling — these are raw completions. The bunching phenomenon at the old £250k notch is well documented in the economics literature (Best & Kleven, 2018); the post-April-2025 threshold measurements are ours. Free to quote and republish with attribution to Housometer and a link.
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (© Crown copyright), OGL v3.0. Analysis: Housometer, July 2026. See also how we work with data.
This analysis comes from the data behind every report.
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