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

856 replies

MaureenOHara · 20/09/2026 09:27

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?

OP posts:
Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 16:51

Mouldemort · 20/09/2026 16:03

It's a wealth tax designed to hit millionaires. It's affects about 100,000 properties in London, where there are 4m or so dwellings - so that is 2.5%. If you own a £2m property, you are wealthy. If just so happens that the journalists and commentators who are complaining about this are wealthy, but think they are not.

You do understand that a tax on properties worth 1.5m has a trickle down impact?

i.e. the M2M value of cheaper homes will also revalue lower.

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 16:54

myjamisbetterthanyours · 20/09/2026 16:32

Tax the old lady so we give more benefits?

Who was it that says that? Or words to that effect?

Someone in the cabinet, wasn’t it?

They often aren’t separate groups though which people seem to struggle with. Plenty of older people live in expensive homes & get pension credit, attendance allowance, carers allowance etc.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 16:54

bananaobama · 20/09/2026 16:16

I live in the South East, expensive commuter town

£1.5m gets you a f off detached 5 bed property

tax em I say

Do you own your house?

If so, how much is it worth, fair value?

LifeOnEnceladus · 20/09/2026 16:56

KatiePricesKnickers · 20/09/2026 15:29

As someone else said, this is tinkering around the edges.
It’s not going to improve anything tangible, for anyone.
Benefits Britain is just in a managed decline.
It might well be better for a proper crash and the IMF come in and make us take the medicine.

The IMF don’t have the money to bail out the UK, even if they wanted to.

There’s nobody who is going to arrive to save the UK.

What will happen is that this incompetence will continue until the Government either cannot sell its gilts as there is no market for them, causing a fiscal crisis, or the rates the market will buy them at will be so high that the Government cannot pay it without huge devaluation of GBP (Harold Wilson, anyone?). Even that (and the extremely sharp resulting crash in UK living standards, the like of which seems incomprehensible to many people) still wouldn’t resolve the issue because unlike comparator countries the UK has issued a significant proportion of its debt index-linked so it cannot even inflate away a large chunk of it! Also extremely unwise to be running an enormous and ever widening trade deficit and importing huge amounts of inflation when you are reliant on imports for a large proportion of basic necessities like food and energy.

The UK electorate seems to think that it has some kind of inalienable right to a standard of living not enjoyed throughout most of history and still not enjoyed by the vast majority of people on Earth. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will continue, in fact it is highly unlikely to do so unless significant steps are taken imminently to rebalance the economy and tax system and create growth. Other countries will not care about this at all, just as the UK population is quite happy getting on with daily life in the knowledge that there are people living in poverty around the world. No knight in shining armour, IMF or otherwise, will come to save us.

The decline in productivity and growth relative to the rest of the world compounds very quickly. In another decade it will be far too late to turn it around. We can very quickly become a poor country. Our GDP per capita is already woeful internationally compared to where it ranked just a decade ago.

The choices are either appropriate, obvious steps are taken now and the electorate accepts that “tax everyone but me more to pay for what I want!” is not a viable economic strategy and has a 100% chance of making them poorer as well, or (far more likely because we have no politicians with any backbone or morality and all they are interested in is being elected again, not doing the right thing for the country and its citizens) politicians will continue actively making the problem even worse while the electorate cheers them on until there is a fiscal crisis and then the economic shock will be ten times worse and people will find that their benefits, state pensions, public sector pensions etc simply will not be paid.

The UK electorate is so poorly educated in basic economics and so incapable of thinking rationally rather than wasting time with class wars and irrelevancies and blaming the state of the economy on issues which are effectively a rounding error in the national budget that I presume the latter will be the case and it will take many decades to recover from and all be far more painful than it needs to be if we had competent politicians who would take sensible steps now.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 16:57

SirenScream · 20/09/2026 16:20

if lending is cut then property prices will fall, too much lending is a big part of the reason that property prices have risen disproportionately

Well then, I recommend you short the listed UK lending banks - because their collective share price is about to tumble.

myjamisbetterthanyours · 20/09/2026 16:57

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 16:54

They often aren’t separate groups though which people seem to struggle with. Plenty of older people live in expensive homes & get pension credit, attendance allowance, carers allowance etc.

Are you comfortable with taking money from them then?

BeardySchnauzer · 20/09/2026 16:57

I guess the people who will suffer for this are those who really stretched a number of years back to buy a property that has risen in value past the £1.5m but they are still cash poor due to the mortgage. Families won’t just be able to downsize or move area.

but they will reduce the thresholds until everyone is paying - it’s the way every tax has worked out.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 16:59

LifeOnEnceladus · 20/09/2026 16:56

The IMF don’t have the money to bail out the UK, even if they wanted to.

There’s nobody who is going to arrive to save the UK.

What will happen is that this incompetence will continue until the Government either cannot sell its gilts as there is no market for them, causing a fiscal crisis, or the rates the market will buy them at will be so high that the Government cannot pay it without huge devaluation of GBP (Harold Wilson, anyone?). Even that (and the extremely sharp resulting crash in UK living standards, the like of which seems incomprehensible to many people) still wouldn’t resolve the issue because unlike comparator countries the UK has issued a significant proportion of its debt index-linked so it cannot even inflate away a large chunk of it! Also extremely unwise to be running an enormous and ever widening trade deficit and importing huge amounts of inflation when you are reliant on imports for a large proportion of basic necessities like food and energy.

The UK electorate seems to think that it has some kind of inalienable right to a standard of living not enjoyed throughout most of history and still not enjoyed by the vast majority of people on Earth. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will continue, in fact it is highly unlikely to do so unless significant steps are taken imminently to rebalance the economy and tax system and create growth. Other countries will not care about this at all, just as the UK population is quite happy getting on with daily life in the knowledge that there are people living in poverty around the world. No knight in shining armour, IMF or otherwise, will come to save us.

The decline in productivity and growth relative to the rest of the world compounds very quickly. In another decade it will be far too late to turn it around. We can very quickly become a poor country. Our GDP per capita is already woeful internationally compared to where it ranked just a decade ago.

The choices are either appropriate, obvious steps are taken now and the electorate accepts that “tax everyone but me more to pay for what I want!” is not a viable economic strategy and has a 100% chance of making them poorer as well, or (far more likely because we have no politicians with any backbone or morality and all they are interested in is being elected again, not doing the right thing for the country and its citizens) politicians will continue actively making the problem even worse while the electorate cheers them on until there is a fiscal crisis and then the economic shock will be ten times worse and people will find that their benefits, state pensions, public sector pensions etc simply will not be paid.

The UK electorate is so poorly educated in basic economics and so incapable of thinking rationally rather than wasting time with class wars and irrelevancies and blaming the state of the economy on issues which are effectively a rounding error in the national budget that I presume the latter will be the case and it will take many decades to recover from and all be far more painful than it needs to be if we had competent politicians who would take sensible steps now.

The IMF’s role also includes technical assistance, which means IMF technocrats would step in to help run the UK economy.

That would prove existential for Labour, because welfare would be cut immediately.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:00

BeardySchnauzer · 20/09/2026 16:57

I guess the people who will suffer for this are those who really stretched a number of years back to buy a property that has risen in value past the £1.5m but they are still cash poor due to the mortgage. Families won’t just be able to downsize or move area.

but they will reduce the thresholds until everyone is paying - it’s the way every tax has worked out.

Agreed, and they will cite falling asset values (which they caused) for a drop in forecast revenue.

Utter morons.

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:01

PigletJohn · 20/09/2026 16:26

I have great difficulty in believing that middle earners have two million pound houses.

What do you imagine is the UK median earnings?
(Of people should pay tax)

It depends on when you got on the ladder, I know people with 1m equity because they bought in the 90s.

My in-laws house in Hackney was 40k ish in the 80s, area has changed somewhat & now worth 2m ish.

BeardySchnauzer · 20/09/2026 17:01

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:00

Agreed, and they will cite falling asset values (which they caused) for a drop in forecast revenue.

Utter morons.

And then be surprised when the black hole gets bigger

has no one sat them down and explained how the black hole is computed?

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:05

@myjamisbetterthanyoursIt goes back to the argument of targeting wealth vs income.
I don’t think a property tax in itself is wrong because stamp duty has made moving so expensive but I don’t agree with this policy.

Constantrunner · 20/09/2026 17:05

Sounds fair enough to me. If you have a house worth £1.5 million or more, you can pay more tax.

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:07

@LifeOnEnceladus I agree we have a very small window to turn things around. What economic policies do you think would work?

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:08

Constantrunner · 20/09/2026 17:05

Sounds fair enough to me. If you have a house worth £1.5 million or more, you can pay more tax.

Any distinction made between an outright owner and one with, say, 80% leverage?

Constantrunner · 20/09/2026 17:08

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:01

It depends on when you got on the ladder, I know people with 1m equity because they bought in the 90s.

My in-laws house in Hackney was 40k ish in the 80s, area has changed somewhat & now worth 2m ish.

Well they benefitted from buying back 5hen very cheaply and now having a very expensive house.
Although the average house prices in hackney is still way below £1.5 million.

Mouldemort · 20/09/2026 17:08

@LifeOnEnceladus There's a whole wall of text there, which I can boil down to

I used gross salary instead of net salary. That's easily corrected - it's just over 1% of the net salary of someone who has this vast mortgage.

Meanwhile, economic studies have shown that people who earn these salaries have less disposable income on average than those who earn far less and live in cheaper area

Please show me the economic studies where people earning more have less disposable incomes! If you are talking about mortgage costs which they have chosen to incur, this is just nonsense. And the vast majority of them have family wealth in any case.

I don't resent people who earn more than me - you have absolutely no idea how much I earn, for a start - and you are assuming I wouldn't be paying this tax. I pay my taxes, and would be pleased if the put a penny on income tax to fund the NHS and clawed back the £59 bn that tax-dodging arseholes are costing us all.

Then you say the UK has an especially high tax burden on people with high incomes. That's simply not true with the exception of the top 0.1% of earners. And those people are just fine and they are not leaving.

Then we move onto the old brain drain shibboleth - it's just not happening.

taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occur-study-reveals/

Constantrunner · 20/09/2026 17:09

Nope.

Mouldemort · 20/09/2026 17:09

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:08

Any distinction made between an outright owner and one with, say, 80% leverage?

We've covered this. In this unlikely event, they are earning more that £300K a year and won't even notice it.

Viviennemary · 20/09/2026 17:10

It means better off folk who can afford more expensive houses will pay more tax. I think it's fair enough.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:15

Mouldemort · 20/09/2026 17:09

We've covered this. In this unlikely event, they are earning more that £300K a year and won't even notice it.

300k per annum equates to approx GBP 13,000 net per month.

A 1.2m mortgage - capital repayment, 25 years, assumed 5% is approx 7k.

So, I disagree, finding another 200/net per month will register.

ThisDandyWriter · 20/09/2026 17:16

BeardySchnauzer · 20/09/2026 10:47

Well there’s talk of an early election so he can get a mandate for raising income tax

unfortunately That’s the only way they can raise what they need. The mansion tax will raise around half a billion. That’s not going to touch the sides.

Or they can reduce expenditure on benefits and asylum seekers.

Schlossadler · 20/09/2026 17:16

Viviennemary · 20/09/2026 17:10

It means better off folk who can afford more expensive houses will pay more tax. I think it's fair enough.

And lower value houses will also drop in value - you are OK, with that too, right?

myjamisbetterthanyours · 20/09/2026 17:16

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:05

@myjamisbetterthanyoursIt goes back to the argument of targeting wealth vs income.
I don’t think a property tax in itself is wrong because stamp duty has made moving so expensive but I don’t agree with this policy.

One way or the other, the mansion tax will backfire on them.

bingobangs · 20/09/2026 17:16

@Mouldemortwe do tax higher earners on PAYE relatively high & in line with other European. countries compared to lower & middle earners

Higher earners often have less disposable income because they don’t qualify for all the free hours, child benefit etc. The problem is the concentration of jobs in London & the SE. we are unusual compared to other countries to have so much concentrated around one city.

Housing is a huge part of the problem.