The cost of selling a house in the UK

Every line of the bill on a £293,000 sale, with the source and the vintage for each figure. Your own total will land somewhere near it, and the commission line is the only one big enough to be worth an argument.

Estate agent commission: About £4,160 on a £293,000 sale

The HomeOwners Alliance puts the 2026 average at 1.42% including VAT, and sole agency at 1.2% to 1.8%. Which?, citing Rightmove data for 2025, puts the average nearer 1.3% including VAT, which is about £3,810 on the same sale.

Conveyancing on the sale: About £700

The HomeOwners Alliance figure for the selling side of a move. Budget more if you are selling a leasehold flat, because your solicitor has a management pack to chase.

Energy Performance Certificate: £35 to £120

The range on our own EPC cost page. You need the certificate before your home goes on the market, and if the one from when you bought is still in date you pay nothing.

Removals: About £550

One published estimate, from the HomeOwners Alliance cost of moving figures for 2026. Distance, volume and whether you pay someone to pack all move it, so treat it as a starting point rather than a price.

Selling through an online agent instead: £129 to £1,599 as a fixed fee

MoneySavingExpert's July 2026 spread across named online providers. Which? gives the market band as £300 to £1,500. Add the identity check that usually sits outside the headline price.

Capital gains tax: Nothing on your only home

If the place has been your only or main home for the whole time you owned it, there is no tax to pay. On a let property or a second home there is, and your agent's bill comes off the gain.

Add the first four lines together and you get about £5,500: £4,160 of commission, £700 of conveyancing, £80 for an EPC and £550 for the van. That is the number to put in your spreadsheet before you speak to anybody. It buys you a marketing photo shoot, a portal listing, viewings, an agent to push the chain along and a solicitor to move the title.

Work out your own figure. The cost of selling calculator takes your sale price and the fee you have been quoted, and gives you an itemised total, commission first, in under a minute. Flag the property as a let or a second home and it adds an estimate of the tax as well.

Before you ring round. Get three quotes, ask for every fee including VAT in writing, and go into the conversation with a target rather than a hope. On sole agency, 1% plus VAT is the number sellers commonly aim for.

Three sources publish an average and none of them agrees with the others, so take the spread rather than a single number. The HomeOwners Alliance puts the 2026 average at 1.42% including VAT, which on your £293,000 sale is about £4,160. Which?, updated in June 2026 and citing Rightmove data for 2025, says the average seller paid roughly 1.3% including VAT, or about £3,810 on the same sale. MoneySavingExpert quotes the high street at 0.75% to 3% plus VAT and works that out as £2,700 to £10,800 on a £300,000 property.

The honest headline is a central estimate of 1.3% to 1.42% including VAT, and a quoted range far wider than that. The HomeOwners Alliance figures put the full spread at 0.9% to 3.6%, which on your sale price is anywhere from about £2,640 to about £10,550. Where you land inside it depends on three things: the contract you sign, how many agents you instruct, and how hard you push.

Sole agency, where one agent markets your home, typically runs 1.2% to 1.8% including VAT. Multi-agency, where several compete, runs 3% to 3.6%, because only the winner gets paid and the price reflects that. On your £293,000 sale the difference between the two is a flat £5,270 at every point of the range, and multi-agency only earns its keep if it genuinely finds you a better buyer.

Always ask whether the quote includes VAT, because the two ways of writing it are not the same number. A fee of 1.2% plus VAT is 1.44% of your sale price. A fee of 1.3% including VAT is 1.3%. The rules require your agent to tell you what you will pay, when it becomes payable and what else gets charged on top. That has to happen before you sign anything, so get all of it in writing.

Watch the extras, because they sit outside the headline percentage. Premium portal listings, professional photography, a floorplan and a withdrawal fee if you take the house off the market are all charged separately by some agents. One national fixed-fee agent's own price page, in August 2026, listed an £80 anti-money-laundering check outside its headline price. Ask for the total, in pounds, on the sale you are actually expecting.

It is negotiable, and you get further with a figure than with a request. On sole agency the target sellers commonly quote is 1% plus VAT, which is 1.2% including it. Move from the 1.42% average to 1.2% on your £293,000 sale and you keep about £640. That is more than your conveyancing and your EPC put together.

Push at the valuation, before you have said yes to anyone. That is the only moment when several agents are competing for the same instruction, and once the board is up your leverage is gone. Say plainly that you hold a cheaper quote elsewhere. Agents expect it and they do not want to lose the business.

Ask about a sliding scale too. A lower base rate with a higher percentage above an agreed price gives your agent a reason to chase the top of your range rather than the quickest offer.

If the rate will not move, negotiate the contract instead. The tie-in period and the notice period decide what happens when the agent turns out to be wrong for you. They are usually easier to shift than the percentage. A sixteen week lock-in on a home that is not selling costs you far more than twenty basis points ever will.

You can, and nothing in law stops you. Selling your own home is not estate agency, so none of the licensing and redress machinery that binds an agent applies to you. What you cannot do is prepare the transfer deed for a fee, which is why almost everybody still uses a conveyancer for that part.

On the headline the saving is real. MoneySavingExpert's July 2026 round-up puts named online providers between £129 and £1,599 as a fixed fee, and Which? gives the wider market band as £300 to £1,500. That is the online-agent route, the one that gets your home on to the portals. Against £4,160 of commission on your £293,000 sale, a £999 fixed fee plus the £80 identity check leaves you about £3,081 better off. Skip the agent altogether and a private listing package is £0 to £400, which puts more cash on the table and all of the work on you.

Then read the small print, because that is where the fixed-fee models differ from each other. Some want the money up front and keep it whether or not you sell. Some take a deposit and the balance on completion. Some defer the whole fee, and a deferred fee that falls due on a date rather than on completion is a different animal from one that does not. Which? puts accompanied viewings at around £300 extra, and notes that the default on most of these services is that you do the viewings yourself.

Nobody can tell you honestly whether you end up ahead, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. There is no current independent dataset showing whether online sellers achieve a lower price than high street ones. Which? points out that a flat fee gives an agent less reason to chase the top of your range. Providers say they usually hit the asking price. Those are positions, not evidence. If saving £3,000 on the fee costs you £5,000 on the price, you are worse off.

Conveyancing. About £700 for the selling side of an average move. A leasehold flat costs more. Your solicitor has to get a management pack out of the freeholder or the managing agent, and that can hold up the whole chain as well as the bill. Ask for it on day one.

The EPC. Between £35 and £120, and you need it before the property is marketed rather than before it sells. If you still have a valid certificate from when you bought, you pay nothing at all, so check that first.

Removals. One published estimate puts an average move at about £550. Distance, volume and whether you pay someone to pack are what move it, and quotes vary far more than any other line here. Treat that £550 as a starting point rather than a price.

Everything on the buying side. If you are moving rather than just selling, the purchase is where the real money goes. Expect stamp duty, a survey at around £650, purchase conveyancing at around £1,050 and mortgage arrangement fees around £1,000. There is a Land Registry fee too. That one is fixed by law and depends on your price band, which makes it the only line on the whole move you cannot shop around for. The moving costs guide takes both ends of the chain in one place.

What is not on this list. You do not pay stamp duty to sell, and you do not pay the Land Registry fee on the property you are leaving. Both belong to the buyer, so keep them out of your selling budget.

Cheaper on paper is not the same as better off, and each of these routes moves the cost somewhere you might not be looking for it.

A traditional auction gives you certainty, because the contract is made when the hammer falls and your buyer cannot walk away. One auction house published its commission as 2% to 3% plus VAT in August 2026, with a minimum fee from £1,500. On your £293,000 sale that is roughly £7,030 to £10,550 including VAT, which is more than a high street agent. You are paying for speed and a binding buyer, not for a lower fee.

The modern method of auction looks free to you, because the buyer pays. The HomeOwners Alliance records the reservation fee as usually at least 2.5% plus VAT, or a minimum of £6,000 including VAT. On a £293,000 home that is around £8,790, and your buyer has to find it on top of what they bid. That narrows your pool of buyers and drags on the price they can offer. The timetable is typically 28 days to exchange and another 28 to complete.

Part-exchange with a housebuilder saves you the commission and the chain, and pays for it with the offer. The developer prices in a discount to the open market value, and that discount is usually far larger than the fee you avoided. It is a genuine arm's length sale, so if the property is taxable the lower price genuinely reduces your gain, which is one of the very few consolations.

The costs are the same. The order of operations is not, and getting it wrong is the most common reason a probate sale collapses halfway through.

The bill itself does not move. On a £293,000 probate sale you are still looking at about £4,160 of commission, £700 of conveyancing and an EPC, and the estate pays them out of the proceeds rather than anyone paying them personally. What changes is who is taxed on any rise in value between the date of death and the day the sale completes.

The house does not belong to whoever inherits it until it is transferred to them. It sits with the personal representatives, and if there is more than one of them, they all have to agree to the sale, or a court has to order it. The exception is where probate was granted to only some of the named executors, in which case the ones who proved the will can sell on their own. Practically, you also want the grant in hand before you commit to a buyer, because the timetable is not yours to control until you have it.

There is a decision to take before you list, and it is worth taking deliberately. Selling as the personal representatives is not the same, for tax, as transferring the property to the beneficiaries and letting them sell it. Which one leaves the family better off depends on how many beneficiaries there are and what else they have sold that year. Make the call before the board goes up, not after an offer comes in.

Not if the place has been your only or main home for the whole time you owned it. That covers most sellers. You do pay on a buy to let, a second home or a holiday place. You also pay, on part of the gain, if you lived in the property for some of the time you owned it and let it out for the rest.

Your selling costs come off the gain, so the agent you have been arguing with is partly paid for by the tax you no longer owe. Sell a former rental for £300,000, a round number rather than the £293,000 average used above, and commission at 1.42% including VAT is £4,260. Add £700 of conveyancing and you have £4,960 coming off the gain, which is worth just under £1,200 at the higher residential rate. Because you cannot reclaim the VAT, you deduct the gross fee, not the amount before VAT.

The list of costs that qualify is a closed one, and it is shorter than most people assume. In go your agent's commission, your solicitor's fees on the sale, the cost of advertising to find a buyer, an auctioneer's fees if you sell that way, a surveyor's or valuer's fee, and the cost of any valuation you need in order to work the gain out. Out comes the £550 removals line you costed at the top of this page, along with storage, cleaning and anything you spent making the place look presentable. Mortgage interest and early repayment charges do not reduce the gain either.

One date worth knowing before you exchange. If there is tax to pay, it has its own return and a 60 day deadline that runs from completion, not from the day you shook hands. The full guide takes you through the rates, the allowance and the mechanics.

Put your sale price and your quoted fee into the cost of selling calculator. It comes back in under a minute with commission, conveyancing, EPC and removals in one column. Tell it the property is a let or a second home and it adds the tax on top.

Then keep the completion statement. It is the one piece of paper that evidences your commission, your conveyancing fee and anything the agent added on top. If the property is taxable, you will want those figures long after you have forgotten them. Filed properly today, it is worth a few hundred pounds of tax the year you sell.

One decision is worth taking before you exchange rather than after: the date you exchange, not the date you complete, is what fixes which tax year the gain falls into. A sale that exchanges on 1 April and completes on 20 May is taxed in the year that has just ended, while the reporting clock runs from the May date. If your sale is anything other than a straightforward main home, that gap is where the money is.