The stamp duty holiday ended on 31st March this year, and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) receipts show that, in April, the number of property completions fell to its lowest level of any month since May 2020, when the housing market was shuttered during the Covid pandemic.
HMRC’s data reveal there were 54,720 residential property completions above £40,000 across Great Britain in April 2025. This compares to 45,620 such transactions in May 2020, during the first lockdown.
More pertinently, April’s completion figure marked a 66% decline from the 162,190 transactions that took place in March 2025, when there was a notable spike in sales as buyers rushed to complete before the stamp duty holiday ended. As our previous research outlined, March saw the largest increase in transactions prior to the end of any stamp duty holiday since at least 2009.
It's normal to see an uptick in transactions in the final month of a stamp duty holiday as buyers rush to get their purchases over the line in time to save money, and then there’s a subsequent hangover the following month. However, April 2025’s figure marks the largest fall in transactions after a stamp duty holiday ended since at least 2009. For example, in the month following the introduction of the 3% stamp duty surcharge on second homes in April 2016, completions fell by 57%. And they declined by 62% in the month after June 2021, after the end of the Covid stamp duty holiday that saw no tax payable on the first £500,000 of a property’s value.
As a reminder, first-time buyers are facing the biggest increase in tax bills after the latest threshold change – they are paying up to £11,250 more stamp duty than previously, whereas movers now face a maximum tax bill increase of £2,500.
Our research also shows that, in April, after the stamp duty holiday ended, the average stamp duty bill in England rose to an all-time high of 1.6% (£4,783) of the average £295,654 property purchase price. This is double the proportion seen in March 2025, when the average stamp duty bill of £2,283 was equal to 0.8% of the typical property value in England.
In London, the average stamp duty bill is now hovering close to the record highs seen during the summer of 2022, when average purchase prices were higher. The average tax bill for purchasers in the capital has risen from £15,104 (2.7% of the average £552,073 purchase price) in March 2025 to £17,604 the following month, equivalent to 3.2% of the property’s value. This proportion was only higher, at 3.3% of the average London property price, from June to August 2022 when buyers spent an average of £581,320, £29,250 more than today.
While the increased tax burden can act as a disincentive to move, the rise in most buyers’ stamp duty bills has been offset by the fact that mortgage rates have come down in recent months. And these lower rates should support the level of sales over the year ahead. We expect there to be around 1.2 million completions across Great Britain this year, up from 1,076,530 in 2024.
