Mansion Tax at £1.5m - what will this mean?

[MaureenOHara]

Does anyone have any idea what this might mean for an individual and what it might do to the market. What happened to the £2m market and will that be replicated or is it different?

@cityliving99 "However no one is going to buy their house at that price point now"

A person who has lots of money and wants to buy an expensive house will buy it.

They spend more in a year on (insert trivial item here)

Nah, most of these houses are going to end up selling for 600k, 700k, most are not properties that the truly wealthy buy, and smart money doesn"t overpay at the end of a massive property bubble where property is about to be taxed to fuck by a government that wants dossers kept in the style they have become accustomed to! Anyway there are not enough really wealthy people around to buy all the overpriced stock, many people in the UK were pretending to be wealthy but they were doing it with cheap debt tokens.

Oh, Wait a minute! Looks like they are going to double down and try to bail it out! Will people still be dumb enough to get involved this time around, it is very obvious that these guys all work for the bankers isn"t it?

https://inews.co.uk/news/burnham-your-first-home-scheme-help-property-ladder-4793086?ico=more_from_this_author

The crowd behind him all hoping to offload their BTL"s to some young mug, LOL.

You seem very resentful.

Resentful of what, a Ponzi scheme?

You seem resentful of your claim thst prices will go down, resulting in homeowners no longer being liable for the £2million home surcharge
"most of these houses are going to end up selling for 600k, 700k"

Abd you seem resentful of a proposed attempt to help first-time buyers
"Oh, Wait a minute! Looks like they are going to double down and try to bail it out!"

Abd you seem resentful of the possibility that some people may buy homes that were previously locked in tbe rental market
"The crowd behind him all hoping to offload their BTL"s to some young mug, LOL"

And all that's just on one page.

And you seem resentful of anyone who doesn’t live in their mother’s spare bedroom.

So if there is going to be a new help to buy do we tell our young people to use their savings in their CTF towards their student loans after all? So not for a future housing deposit. Because if they keep it they won’t get help to buy. Or is it just going to be those kids who get full maintenance loans paid and will then get help to buy as well. But all of those of us who saved a bit and have to pay to top up maintenance loans are then also expected to remortgage in old age to release equity? And pay 40-60% income tax?
Or will it only be if we send our kids up North to work there will they get help to buy?

well the way it is going you have to sell your property in the SE wherever, move North and let your kids live in their bedrooms there in a proper mansion. And don’t work but live off your passive income forever more. The way they do the tax policies encourages just that kind of thing.

The poster said ‘renovations’ and included roofer, plumber etc as well as window. I expect she’s saying she wouldn’t extend her property if it pushed it over the tax threshold. She won’t be the only one thinking that either. Extensions are already expensive but if that then takes your property just over the threshold then it’ll put ppl off.

There is a difference between capex which adds value and is an „improvement“ versus maintenance/like for like replacement (eg replacing a window/boiler at the end of its life). It gets complicated when the replacement ties in with energy efficiency for example you replace an old roof with a fully insulated one with solar panels. The latter being a clear improvement, the full insulation being up to today’s standards/possibly even a legal requirement. When it’s a legal requirement it’s arguably not an improvement.

Do you know how old? And is the income capped at state pension? I’ve not heard anything about being able to defer until death.

Where I live in London, if your house is in the catchment of a really sought after secondary school it is worth 20% more on sale. If the secondary school falls out of favour, it will equally be worth less overnight. Same applies to traffic restrictions - if you live on a busy road it is worth 10-20% less but if your neighbours campaign for traffic restrictions to be put in and the speed limit lowered to 20 miles per hour, it suddenly becomes a less trafficked street overnight potentially, with an increase in value. These things are the unpredictable things affecting house values around the proposed values. None of it is objective enough to base a particular tax on. It is not based on size etc but transient external criteria.

And in Central London in some of the big mansion blo

Mansion blocks with large flats - the value is dependent on the service charge and if the building requires a massive new capex injection any time soon and a massive service charge increase. That lowers the value. As well as the amount left on a leasehold - so if you are around the 90 year mark the value goes down and exactly how is mansion tax going to deal with these things.

I honestly don’t understand why the government doesn’t simply put up income tax and put a tax on foreign owners of property. That would catch people who don’t pay income tax on the Uk. Far quicker and simpler.

1. Resentful of my own claim? That is quite an odd observation.

2. You really honestly believe they are trying to "help" FTB?

3. Was meant to be humorous but maybe you never got that, the scheme won"t work anyway because the bond market is going to push up the cost of mortgage debt as soon as they start babbling about their "budget".

The photo just screams "Clueless".

https://www.financialmirror.com/2026/09/24/is-uk-headed-to-new-truss-moment-amid-rising-yields/

Nigel isn't clueless, he's just a dedicated right-wing campaigner for Tax cuts for the rich, and reducing consumer protection

If the question is "Mansion Tax at £1.5m - what will this mean?"

Then the answer is probably "Nothing, because it is just a scare story that isn't going to happen "

It has had the desired effect of whipping up public opposition to a tax aimed at reducing the easy ride that Council Tax was designed to give to owners of the country's most expensive houses.

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/06/05/taxing-other-people-uk/

“Running out of road
Taxing the rich will always be politically popular, whether it’s justified as progressive redistribution or political expediency. There is a reason politicians keep promising that somebody else will pay.
The difficulty is that Britain has already spent a generation taxing somebody else, and by international standards we have been remarkably successful. The UK now raises a relatively large amount of tax while imposing a relatively low tax burden on ordinary wages. But this has run its course.
A generation of frozen thresholds means that they are no longer just a tax increase for “other people”; the average worker can expect to be directly affected. The popular new ways of taxing “other people” – targeting billionaires and banks – raise very limited sums in the context of UK public spending. And that ominous uptick at the end of the UK “tax wedge” chart matches the uptick at the end of the “British attitudes” chart.
All this is, in part, a failure of the modern Left. The traditional social-democratic argument was never that we can fund a decent society by finding a few unpopular groups and taxing them ever harder. It was that good public services require broad-based taxation, and that people should be willing to pay for the civilisation they want to live in. Most of the contemporary Left has abandoned that argument. It still wants a European-sized state, but sells it with the fantasy that someone else can pick up the bill.
This has been mirrored by a failure of the Right. It is still just as eloquent at denouncing the tax burden, but has become unwilling to identify spending cuts large enough to make a serious difference. It will argue for welfare cuts, but rarely identifies specific reforms that save more than a tiny fraction of overall spending. And it is generally unwilling to touch the biggest and most popular areas of spending: pensions, the NHS, social care and defence. So the Right ends up with its own version of the same evasion.
And so we end up with political failure. The Left says we can have European spending without European taxes because “the rich” will pay – and so, when it finds itself in power, presides over deteriorating public services. The Right says we can have lower taxes without confronting the spending programmes voters most want to protect – and so, when in power, has raised tax.
Britain may have a viable path in either direction: higher broad-based taxes to fund a larger state, or lower spending to sustain a lower-tax economy. I don’t know which would be more successful, but I know that we cannot have both.
Politicians can keep pretending there are pain-free answers: cutting “waste” on one side, taxing “other people” on the other. That may fool the voters and win elections, but sooner or later, we have to choose. Higher taxes that most people will pay? Or spending cuts that most people will feel?
The strategy of taxing “other people” has run out of road.”

"the easy ride that Council Tax was designed to give to owners of the country's most expensive houses"

By which I mean that Council Tax is a tax in some way proportional to the value of a home. You might, or might not, think that a tax on home value is a good idea, but that is what it is.

At the low and middle home values, it is somewhat proportional. If I have a house worth twice as much as yours, I would expect to pay more than you. If my neighbour has a house worth twice as much as mine, I would expect them to pay more than me.

But the system was designed so that at the highest values, proportionality was designed out. Multimillionaires paid the same as billionaires and multibillionaires. Almost as if the system had been designed by the rich to favour the very rich.

You might or might not think that was a good idea.

But the tax surcharge is a small step against the open-ended free ride that the owners of the most valuable houses have enjoyed.

@PigletJohn - again, it is only those who haven’t bought in the last 15 years. All the others have paid hefty stamp duty on expensive properties upfront. So you have some people who did not move but they will likely be caught out either by inheritance tax or social care costs in old age anyway. So why go distort the housing market further with a pointless tax like this that doesn’t raise much anyway.
If they are serious about reforming council tax brackets just create a few more definite ones and be done with it. Rather than this rhetoric of mansion tax funding the North East etc like private school VAT was meant to fund state schools en masse. It is an insult to people’s intelligence as most people can master some basic at the back of an envelope maths. It is toxic leftie chat.

Reforming the council tax system needs doing, but there is no consensus on how it should change, and it will take many years.

But the tax surcharge is a small step against the open-ended free ride that the owners of the most valuable houses have enjoyed.

Today's question is, should the free ride continue, or should it end.

I know what I think.

You?