A free UK home-buying cost calculator for first-time buyers, home movers and additional-property buyers.
Move the sliders to see every upfront cost of a purchase — Stamp Duty, deposit, legal fees, survey, Land Registry, removals, broker fees, and the contingency you'll need in the first month — calculated against current 2026 tax rates for England, Scotland and Wales. Then see exactly when each cost is due, check whether your savings clear the bar, and hand the figures to a regulated UK mortgage broker if you'd like a real-world second opinion.
Type in roughly what you have saved towards this purchase. The gauge shows the gap — or the surplus — against the hard costs above.
A calculator gives you a realistic estimate. A broker checks it against the lender criteria you'll actually be applying under, factors in your personal situation, and tells you whether your cash and your borrowing both clear the bar — before you make an offer.
A common mistake: assuming you need the whole sum the day you make an offer. You don't. Each cost lands at a different stage of the buying process — and a few only land after you've moved in.
The survey finds something. A buyer on r/HousingUK paid £1,000 for a Level 3 survey and ended up spending another £1,800 on follow-up checks — roofer, electrician, boiler — because the report flagged enough that they needed answers before exchange. If you can't afford the survey, you can't afford the repairs the survey would have warned you about.
Stamp Duty is paid in cash, not added to your mortgage. If you're buying at £250,000 as a home mover, you owe £2,500 within 14 days of completion. That money has to be in your account — not borrowed against the property.
Furniture, white goods, immediate fixes. The previous owners are taking the curtains. Probably the fridge too. The Reddit threads are full of people who were £3,000-£5,000 over budget by the end of the first month because the house genuinely needed things on day one.
The mortgage broker fee is variable. The calculator defaults to £643 — the 2026 average paid by clients of fee-charging brokers, per Boon Brokers' research. But fee-free, whole-of-market brokers (like L&C, Habito or Boon themselves) charge nothing — the lender pays them via commission, the same commission all brokers receive. If you choose a fee-free broker, slide that figure to £0.
Stamp Duty. As of April 2025, first-time buyers in England and Northern Ireland pay no Stamp Duty on the first £300,000 of a purchase up to £500,000. A home mover at the same price starts paying Stamp Duty above £125,000.
On a £250,000 purchase that's a difference of £2,500. On a £400,000 purchase it's £5,000. It's the single biggest variable in the calculation. Wales has no first-time buyer relief at all; Scotland has its own first-time buyer threshold of £175,000.
No, not directly. Stamp Duty is a tax, not a purchase cost — it's paid to HMRC, separately, within 14 days of completion. The funds need to be in your account on the day.
What you can sometimes do is take a slightly larger mortgage and a slightly smaller deposit, freeing up cash for the tax. That's a conversation for a broker, because the maths interacts with your loan-to-value band and the rate you'll get.
For a new-build under the NHBC warranty, often no — the developer's warranty covers structural issues for ten years, and you can pay separately for snagging. For anything older than about ten years, a survey is the cheapest piece of insurance you'll buy on the entire purchase.
Level 2 (Homebuyer) is the standard for a property in good condition. Level 3 (Building) is for older properties, anything unusual, or where the Level 2 turns up something that needs deeper investigation. Skipping the survey to save £500 and ending up with £15,000 of repairs is the classic FTB trap.
The buying costs are the same. Your borrowing figure is what changes — high-street lenders often quote contractors off two years of accounts and come back with a low figure. Specialist lenders use day rate or current contract value and arrive at something materially higher.
If you're a contractor, sole trader, or director on Ltd Co accounts, talk to a broker who handles those cases routinely before deciding what you can buy. The contractor calculator is built for that.
The calculator defaults to roughly 1.5% of the property value as a smart-to-have buffer for the first month — so on a £250,000 purchase that's about £3,750. That covers a typical mix of: a boiler service or repair, electrical fixes flagged by the survey, immediate decorating, basic furniture you discover you need, and the small unexpected things (locks rekeyed, missing curtain rails, a fridge that doesn't fit).
If the property is older, in worse condition, or your survey flagged anything material, double it. If it's nearly new, you can run lighter.
The timeline above shows the full sequence, but the short version: survey is paid within days of offer acceptance; legal disbursements (searches) are paid in the first couple of weeks; the cash deposit is transferred at exchange; the legal fee, Land Registry fee and removals are settled around completion; Stamp Duty is paid within 14 days of completion; and the first-month contingency is exactly that — cash you need available, not committed up front.