The stamp duty thresholds dropped back in April, and a lot of people in the industry expected the spring rush to die with them. It hasn't, quite. Walk into a branch in Leeds or Bristol right now and the diary is fuller than the headlines suggest. The reason isn't sentiment or some return of confidence — it's arithmetic, and it's worth unpicking if you're thinking of moving before the autumn.
What actually changed in April
Since 1 April 2026, first-time buyers pay no stamp duty up to £300,000 instead of the £425,000 that applied through the temporary relief. For everyone else, the nil-rate band went back to £125,000. On a £350,000 home, a first-time buyer who would have paid nothing last March now hands over £2,500. That's real money, but it's not the deal-breaker some predicted.
The thing nobody put on the front page: the relief had been pulling transactions forward for months. Buyers who could complete before the deadline did. So part of what looks like a slowdown is just a hole where March's borrowed demand used to be. June is, in a sense, the first honest month we've had in a while.
The mortgage picture is doing the heavy lifting
Two-year fixes that sat above 5% for most of last year are now landing in the 4.1–4.4% range for buyers with a 15% deposit, after the Bank of England held base rate at 4% through the spring. On a £250,000 repayment mortgage over 25 years, the gap between a 5.2% rate and a 4.3% rate is roughly £130 a month. That's the number doing the work — not stamp duty, which you pay once, but the monthly figure you live with for years.
Lenders have also quietly loosened a few criteria. A handful are back to offering income multiples above 4.5 times for stronger applicants, and several have brought back 95% deals that vanished during the nervous patch. None of this makes headlines the way a stamp duty change does, but it moves more buyers than the tax ever did.
Who this actually helps
- First-time buyers in the North and Midlands, where the average price sits comfortably under £300,000 — they pay no stamp duty anyway, so April's change touched them not at all.
- Buyers who were priced out by monthly cost, not deposit, and are now finding the repayment maths works again.
- Anyone selling a flat, oddly. Flat values lagged houses badly for two years, and the gap has narrowed enough that some chains that were stuck are moving.
It helps the London first-timer a lot less. In a city where the average flat still clears £450,000, losing the higher threshold genuinely stings — that's a £7,500 stamp duty bill where there was nothing before. If you're buying in zones 1 to 3, the spring of 2026 is materially worse than the spring of 2025, and no amount of cheerful agent talk changes that.
The catch worth knowing before you commit
Inventory is thin. The number of homes coming to market has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and in some commuter towns it's still down noticeably year on year. That's why prices have held up despite higher rates — there simply isn't much to buy. If you find something that works, the competition for it is real, and gazumping has crept back in the hotter postcodes.
There's also the leasehold question hovering over flats. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act provisions have been rolling out in stages, and some buyers are pausing on flats with short leases, waiting to see how the new valuation rules settle. If you're buying a flat with under 80 years left on the lease, get a proper figure for extending it before you offer — the marriage value rules are mid-change and the cost can swing.
So should you move now or wait?
If you're a first-time buyer under the £300,000 line, the honest answer is that waiting buys you very little. Rates aren't expected to fall sharply — the market is pricing in maybe one more cut this year, not a collapse. Prices aren't falling either, because supply is too tight. You'd be waiting for a discount the data doesn't promise.
If you're stretching past £450,000 and the stamp duty bill genuinely changes whether the deal works, that's a different conversation. Run the full number: deposit, stamp duty, the monthly repayment at the rate you'd actually get, and the cost of staying where you are for another year. Often the rent you'd pay while waiting quietly eats the stamp duty saving you were hoping for.
The quiet truth of June 2026 is that the market got less exciting and more rational at the same time. The tax break that dominated every conversation is gone, and what's left is the boring stuff that always mattered most — what you can borrow, what it costs you each month, and whether there's anything decent to buy. For a lot of buyers, that's actually easier to plan around.