Figures from HMRC showed that in April alone, stamp duty receipts came to £1.3bn, slightly up from £1.2bn in March and flat on the same month a year earlier.
Coventry Building Society said the fall occurred despite more property purchases being liable to the tax, due to the stamp duty threshold change introduced on 1 April 2025.
It noted that activity last year was driven by buyers rushing to complete before the stamp duty change, when the nil-rate threshold dropped from £250,000 to £125,000. The mutual found that buyers have paid £16.4bn since the thresholds changed.
Jonathan Stinton, head of intermediary relationships at Coventry Building Society, said: “When stamp duty goes up, activity can slow down – because you can’t turn up the tax without taking some steam out of the market. For many buyers, finding thousands of pounds for upfront costs on top of deposits, legal fees, and moving costs can be enough to rethink a move.
“Bringing more homes into the tax net might seem like an easy win for the Treasury – but if higher upfront costs discourage people from moving, the overall take can actually start to fall. There’s a risk of creating a lose-lose situation where homebuyers are paying more, but the expected boost to tax receipts doesn’t fully materialise.”
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He added: “Reforming stamp duty could help keep the market moving, which is especially important at a time when many households are feeling cost-of-living pressures. Without a change to the system, the risk is we continue to slow down a housing market that depends on people being able to move freely.”
IHT intake slides to £715m
The inheritance tax (IHT) receipts for April totalled £715m, a £65m decrease on the same period last year.
Intake was slightly down on the previous month, which generated £755m in IHT.
Since the start of the year, £2,6bn has been paid towards the tax, slightly down on the £2.7bn paid over the same period in 2025.
Adam Craggs, partner and head of tax, investigations and financial crime at RPC, said: “IHT is increasingly functioning as a tax on property inflation rather than purely inherited wealth. IHT thresholds have remained frozen while house prices, particularly in London, have increased over the same period.
“The debate is therefore no longer just about the ‘fairness’ of IHT at death. It is increasingly becoming a proxy argument about housing, intergenerational inequality, regional imbalance, and whether the UK’s economic model has become overly dependent on the appreciation of property wealth in London and the South East.”
