Moving house in the UK costs you about £13,275 if you are selling and buying at the England average price of £293,262. That total covers both ends of your chain. On the way out you pay the agent, your solicitor and the certificate you need before you can market, and on the way in you pay stamp duty, a survey and the fee to register your new home. It is the number to budget against, and the table below shows you every line in it.
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What does it cost to move house in the UK?
Your whole bill, on a high street sale and purchase at the England average, with a mortgage on the new home.
- Total, selling and buying: about £13,275 on a £293,262 home.
- Estate agent: £4,164 at the 1.42% average fee including VAT, and it is negotiable.
- Stamp duty: £4,663 on the purchase, or nothing if you are a first-time buyer at this price.
- Solicitors, both ends: about £1,750, and more if either property is leasehold.
- Survey: about £650 for a full building survey, and the best value line on your list.
- Land Registry fee: £150, fixed by law, and the only line nobody can negotiate.
- Removals: about £550, driven by distance, volume and how much packing you hand over.
The itemised version, with what moves each number:
| Cost | Typical cost | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Estate agent commission, sale | £4,164 | 1.42% including VAT is the 2026 average; sole agency deals run 1.2% to 1.8% |
| Solicitor, sale | £700 | Leasehold, shared ownership or a title that has never been registered |
| Energy Performance Certificate | £35 to £120 | Size of the home, and whether you book direct or let the agent arrange it |
| Stamp duty, purchase | £4,663 | The price, and whether the new home replaces your main residence |
| Land Registry fee | £150 | Fixed by price band; £150 covers £200,001 to £500,000 online |
| Survey, purchase | £650 | Type of report, and the age and size of the property |
| Solicitor, purchase | £1,050 | Searches, leasehold packs and what your lender insists on |
| Mortgage arrangement fee | £1,000 | The deal you pick; some products carry no fee at all |
| Mortgage valuation | £150 | Your lender's choice, and plenty of lenders waive it |
| Removals | £550 | Distance, how much you own, and whether you pay for packing |
| Homebuyer protection insurance | £78 | Optional; it pays your costs back if the other side pulls out |
| Mail redirection | £39.50 | How many names are on it, and how long you redirect for |
| Total | £13,275 | Selling, buying and moving, on a £293,262 home |
Where those come from. The 1.42% agent average, and the solicitor, survey, mortgage, removals, insurance and redirection figures, are HomeOwners Alliance 2026 figures. The £293,262 is the England average for June 2026 in the HM Land Registry UK House Price Index. The EPC range is our own and the total takes £80 as its mid point, and stamp duty is worked at the rates for someone replacing their main home. Removals is the softest line: £550 is a single published estimate rather than a market average, and a long move with packing can cost you several times that. One scope note: the stamp duty and Land Registry lines are England. Scotland and Wales charge a different purchase tax and register through their own systems, so those two lines will not be your numbers if you are moving there.
Not all of that £13,275 is simply spent. Some of it comes off a tax bill now, some is banked against the day you sell the new home, and the rest is gone. Which line does what is set out further down.
What does it cost to sell your house?
The agent is your largest selling cost and your only negotiable one of any size. The average fee in 2026 is 1.42% including VAT on the HomeOwners Alliance figures, with sole agency deals running from 1.2% to 1.8% including VAT. On your £293,262 sale, 1.42% is £4,164 and 1.2% is £3,519. No law caps what an agent may charge in England and Wales, which is why the range is so wide. If you are weighing a fixed fee instead, we compare the models in online estate agents, and London runs on its own numbers in average London estate agent fees.
Three quotes is the whole negotiation. On your £293,262 sale the difference between 1.8% and 1.2% is £1,760, so an hour of phone calls is the best paid hour of your move. If one agent came in cheaper, say so to the one you actually want, and what estate agents charge to sell a house shows you what each model really costs. The headline rate is not the only lever, which is the whole point of the cheapest estate agent fees in the UK.
Before you sign, the agent has to tell you what the fee is or how it will be worked out. They also have to tell you when you have to pay it, and what else you might be charged for. If they did not, the agreement is much harder for them to enforce. Watch for the words sole selling rights, because that is not the same as sole agency and it can leave you paying commission on a buyer you found yourself. Push on the length as hard as the rate: a twelve week tie-in with four weeks of notice on top is sixteen weeks you cannot leave, which tie-in periods works through.
Your solicitor on the sale costs about £700, and leasehold adds to it. The freeholder or managing agent charges for the information pack and for answering enquiries, and your solicitor cannot control that.
The Energy Performance Certificate is the cheapest line on your bill and the only one that is a legal condition of marketing. You must have a valid EPC available free of charge at the earliest opportunity. At the latest you need it by the time someone who asks for details in writing gets them, or views the house, whichever comes first. Your buyer must be given one free of charge too. A domestic EPC costs £35 to £120 for most homes, and what an EPC certificate costs breaks that range down. If the rating itself matters to your sale, how EPCs work covers it. If you already hold one that has not expired, you do not need another.
For the selling side in full, see our cost of selling a property guide.
What does it cost to buy the next one?
Stamp duty is the biggest single number on your buying side. At £293,262, replacing your main home, it comes to £4,663. Work out your own with our stamp duty calculator. The figure moves in steps, so a few thousand pounds on the price can shift it more than you expect. If you are buying an additional property rather than replacing your main home, a surcharge applies on top. Our guide to buy-to-let stamp duty and the surcharge covers that case.
The Land Registry fee is the only line on your whole moving bill fixed by law rather than by a market. A fee order that took effect on 9 December 2024 sets it, and every firm charges you the same amount because they have to. The fee goes by the price you pay.
| Price you pay | Fee, whole title lodged online | Fee by post, or for part of a title or a new lease |
|---|---|---|
| £0 to £80,000 | £20 | £45 |
| £80,001 to £100,000 | £40 | £95 |
| £100,001 to £200,000 | £100 | £230 |
| £200,001 to £500,000 | £150 | £330 |
| £500,001 to £1,000,000 | £295 | £655 |
| £1,000,001 and over | £500 | £1,105 |
Two details decide which column you are in. The reduced fee is not a discount for filing online. It is a discount for lodging a transfer or surrender of a whole registered title through the portal or gateway. Buy part of a title, such as a plot split off a larger one, and you pay the full fee. So does a new lease, even lodged electronically. On an ordinary house purchase you get the reduced column, which is why the distinction rarely shows up until it applies to you. Land that has never been registered is different again, and it goes the other way. Buying unregistered land forces first registration, and a forced first registration pays the full fee rather than a reduced one. The discount is only there for an owner who registers voluntarily when nothing obliges them to.
Two smaller rules are worth knowing: the price is rounded down to the nearest whole pound before the band is read, and the fee is charged on the VAT-inclusive amount. The figures above come from HM Land Registry's own published fees guidance, which restates the fee order that took effect in December 2024.
Do you need a survey?
Nothing forces you to buy a survey on a normal purchase, and it is still the best value line on your bill. A full building survey costs about £650, and shorter reports cost less and tell you less. Your lender's valuation is not a survey and it is not for you. It tells the lender the house is worth lending against, and it will not find you a failing roof.
Your solicitor on the purchase costs about £1,050, and that side carries more work. Searches, your lender's own requirements, the title checks and, on leasehold, a management pack nobody can control the price of. Ask for your quote split into the firm's own fee and the payments it makes for you. The second half is where a cheap-looking quote quietly catches up with an expensive one.
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How much do removals cost?
£550, from the HomeOwners Alliance 2026 figures, is the number to start from rather than the number to expect. It is one published estimate rather than a market average, and no second published estimate carries a stated method.
What actually moves your quote is distance, how much you own, access at both ends, and whether you pay the firm to pack. Stairs, a long carry from the van, a piano and a completion date in the last week of the month all push it up. Get three quotes from a video walk-through or a home visit rather than a web form, because a firm that has not seen your loft is guessing. Book early for a Friday, which is the day most chains complete.
None of it comes off any tax bill of yours, and nor do storage, the final clean or the new carpets.
What changes if you are a first-time buyer, or buying without selling?
Buying without a sale takes your whole selling side off the bill. That is £4,944 gone, leaving about £8,331. Selling without buying works the other way and leaves you at roughly £5,534 once removals and redirection are counted in.
First-time buyer relief then does the heavy lifting. It gives you 0% on the first £300,000 and 5% on the slice between £300,000 and £500,000, and it disappears entirely above £500,000. At £293,262 that means no stamp duty at all, so from that £8,331 take the £4,663 off and a first-time buyer is at about £3,668 all in. Our guide to first-time buyer relief covers who qualifies, and the trap of buying with someone who has owned before.
If a house builder has offered to take your old home in part exchange, your arithmetic changes again. The offer usually sits below what an agent would get you, and you pay that gap for certainty and speed. Our guide to part exchange on a house puts numbers on that trade.
What are the hidden costs of moving?
The lines nobody budgets for, in rough order of how much damage they do to you.
- Mortgage arrangement fee, about £1,000. Adding it to your loan feels free and is not, because you then pay interest on it for the whole term.
- Early repayment charge. Leave a fixed deal before it ends and this can dwarf everything else on the page. Check your figure before you list.
- Overlap. Holding two places for a few weeks means two lots of council tax, utilities and insurance at once.
- Insurance from exchange. As the buyer you normally carry the risk from exchange, not completion, so your cover has to start early.
- Storage. Cheap by the week and expensive by the quarter, and the quarter is what chains tend to need.
- Homebuyer protection insurance, about £78. It pays your wasted costs back if the other side pulls out.
- Mail redirection, £39.50. The one everybody forgets and the cheapest thing to fix.
None of these reduces your tax bill at either end, and restructuring your borrowing does not help, because interest is excluded in terms.
Which moving costs are tax deductible?
Your moving bill is not one number, it is three. Some of what you spend comes off a tax bill now, some is worth nothing today and a lot in twenty years, and the rest is simply gone.
| Cost | Which bucket | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
| Estate agent commission | Comes off the gain on the home you are leaving | Cuts a taxable gain on that property now, if you have one |
| Solicitor, sale | Comes off the gain on the home you are leaving | Cuts that same gain |
| Energy Performance Certificate | Usually with the selling costs | Normally taken with the marketing spend, though no guidance names it either way |
| Advertising to find a buyer | Comes off the gain on the home you are leaving | Cuts that same gain |
| Stamp duty on the purchase | Banked into what the new home cost you | Nothing now; cuts the gain when you sell that home |
| Solicitor, purchase | Banked into what the new home cost you | Nothing now; cuts the gain when you sell that home |
| Land Registry fee | Banked into what the new home cost you | Nothing now; cuts the gain when you sell that home |
| Survey | Banked into what the new home cost you | Nothing now; cuts the gain when you sell that home |
| Advertising to find a home to buy | Banked into what the new home cost you | Nothing now; cuts the gain when you sell that home |
| Removals, storage, cleaning | No relief anywhere | Nothing, at either end of the chain |
| Mail redirection, new carpets | No relief anywhere | Nothing, at either end of the chain |
| Mortgage arrangement and valuation fees | No relief anywhere | Nothing, at either end of the chain |
| Mortgage interest and early repayment charges | No relief anywhere | Nothing; interest is ruled out in terms |
On the itemised bill at the top of this page, that is £4,944 in your first bucket, £6,513 in the second and £1,818 in the third. Three points follow, and they are the ones people get wrong.
The deductible list is closed. The rules name the costs you can set against a gain. They are fees to a surveyor, valuer, auctioneer, accountant, agent or legal adviser, and the costs of transfer including stamp duty. They are advertising, and, on the sale side, any valuation you need to work the gain out. If your cost is not on that list it does not count, however unavoidable it felt. Removals is the classic: it feels like a cost of selling and it gets you no relief at all. The EPC is the one arguable line, because it is a legal precondition of marketing, so it normally goes with the marketing spend, though no guidance names it either way.
Which way your advertising points matters. Money you spend advertising the home you are selling is a selling cost, so it comes off your gain now. Money you spend advertising for a property to buy attaches to the new home instead, and sits there until you sell that one. Same activity, opposite ends of your chain, opposite tax treatment.
If you cannot reclaim VAT, use the VAT-inclusive figure. You are not VAT registered on your own home, so the number that comes off your gain is the agent's fee including VAT, not the fee before it. Every figure on this page is stated including VAT for that reason.
Most people never reach that first bucket, because the relief for your main home normally covers the whole gain on a property you lived in throughout. It becomes live in three situations: you let the home out for part of the time you owned it, it was a second home rather than your main one, or the grounds are unusually large.
Where your gain is taxable, that first bucket finally earns its keep, because your £4,944 of selling costs comes straight off the gain before any tax is worked out. Two dates matter here and they are not the same date. The tax year your sale falls into is fixed by the day you exchange contracts. Only where tax is actually due do a return and a payment follow, and that is within 60 days of completion. So exchange on 2 April and complete in June, and the sale sits in the tax year that ended on 5 April while the clock still runs from June. The mechanics are all in our complete guide to capital gains tax on property.
What should you keep, and for how long?
Your second bucket is the reason this section exists. Those costs do nothing for you today and everything on the day you sell, and that day may be twenty years out. Nobody remembers a 2026 survey fee in 2046, and without the invoice you cannot claim it.
Keep your completion statement, the stamp duty return and its receipt, the Land Registry fee, the survey invoice and both solicitors' bills. Add every improvement receipt as you go, because a new kitchen that genuinely improves the property belongs in the same pile. Scan the lot, put it somewhere that survives a laptop dying, and keep it for as long as you own the home. Our page on what to save and how long to keep it lists the whole set.
Your selling side matters for less time. Once the tax year of the sale is settled and any enquiry window has closed, those papers have done their job. The exception is a sale that was taxable, because a deduction has to be evidenced: that is the case if the home you are leaving was a second home. The same goes if you let it out at any point.
Your price is not the England average, so the total on this page is not your total. Our cost of selling calculator gives you your own number instead, itemised line by line, in under a minute.