What does it actually cost to buy a house?

Two of the costs of buying a home are fixed by statute and can be stated exactly. The rest are quoted by people you choose, and anyone who gives you a single number for them is guessing. This article does the first part properly and is honest about the second. The median home sold in England & Wales went for £290,000, on which an English buyer of a single main residence pays £4,500 in stamp duty and £150 to register the title, so £4,650 of the completion statement is fixed by statute.

What does the state take at your region's median price?

Purchase tax and the registration fee are the two costs that follow mechanically from the price. Both are computed below from the current median sold price in each region, so the table describes an ordinary purchase rather than a round number.

The registration fee is the electronic one, because conveyancers lodge through the Land Registry portal and the electronic scale is 55% below the postal scale. It is a disbursement on every completion statement and it is the least discussed cost in the whole transaction, mostly because it is the smallest.

How differently are England and Wales taxed?

England charges Stamp Duty Land Tax with a nil-rate band to £125,000. Wales charges Land Transaction Tax with a nil-rate band to £225,000. On an ordinary Welsh purchase that difference is worth thousands, and it runs in Wales’s favour at the lower end of the market.

The size of it, at the price Wales actually trades at: the median Welsh home sold for £217,000, on which Land Transaction Tax is £0, because the price is below the Welsh nil-rate band. The identical price in England would attract £1,840 of stamp duty. Same money, same kind of home, same island, and one buyer pays a purchase tax while the other does not.

The exception runs the other way and catches people out. Wales has no first-time buyer relief at all. England gives a first-time buyer a nil-rate band to £300,000 and tapers it away entirely above £500,000. A Welsh first-time buyer gets the same £225,000 band as everybody else. So below £225,000 the Welsh buyer pays less and above £300,000 the English first-time buyer usually does.

This site covers England & Wales, so both taxes appear above. Scotland charges Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and is not covered here at all.

What changes if this is your first home?

The relief is worth having and it has a cliff edge rather than a taper: at £500,000 and one pound, the whole relief disappears and the standard rates apply to the entire price. 8 of the 9 English regions have a median sold price at or below the £500,000 ceiling, so for most of the country the relief is reachable at the typical price, and in the dearest regions it is not.

Compare that table with the one above and you can see exactly where the relief stops being available. Nothing changes in the Welsh row, which is the point of the previous section.

Which costs can nobody quote you in advance?

Four more costs land on a normal purchase, and none of them has a schedule. What follows is what each one is and what moves it, which is more useful than a made-up range.

• Conveyancing. A solicitor’s fee plus disbursements, quoted per transaction. It is driven by tenure and complexity far more than by price: a leasehold flat needs the freeholder’s pack, a lease review and often a deed of covenant, and costs materially more than a freehold house of the same value. Tenure changes the purchase in more ways than the price.
• The survey. Priced by level and by property, not by a percentage of the price. A lender’s valuation is not a survey and does not tell you the condition of anything.
• Mortgage fees. Arrangement and product fees, some of which can be added to the loan, which makes them look cheaper and costs more.
• Moving. Removals, storage, and the overlap between the two homes.

The honest rule of thumb: the statutory costs are knowable to the pound before you offer, and the rest need three quotes each. Anyone quoting a national average for a solicitor is averaging leasehold flats in London with freehold houses in Durham.

Which of these is not really a cost?

The deposit is the largest cheque you will write and it is not an expense: it becomes equity in the home. What the table above measures is the money that leaves and does not come back. Keeping the two apart is the difference between a budget that works and one that is short by five figures on completion day.

Before any of this, the question is whether the price itself is reasonable, which is a different exercise: check it against the local rate per square metre first, because a good negotiation is worth more than every fee on this page put together. It is also worth knowing how much floor the same budget buys in each region, because the fees move by a few thousand and the space moves by a factor of three.

Tax rates here are those in force at the time of writing: the English bands are those effective April 2025 and the Welsh bands those effective October 2022. Both are statutory and both change by announcement, so the sources below carry the date each was last checked. The median prices update with the dataset and are current to June 2026.