house exchange and stamp duty

gentlepurr

hi,

just floating round a few ideas in my head at the mo.

my house is for sale at £280,000, and i am looking to downsize to a property with a value of about £200,000. if i was lucky enough to find a buyer that had a property i was willing to "part ex" down to, would we avoid paying stamp duty, as the only money that would be changing hands would be in the region of £70,000?

xx

silvercar

I deleted my previous post in an attempt to edit it, apologies to distilled my info was wrong.

I've now searched about a bit. The purchaser of your house at 280k pays stamp duty in full. You, buying a cheaper property, pay a fixed rate of just £5. There seems to be some sort of exception to this if you are related in some way eg if you are buying your parents home, then stamp duty is payable in full on both.

RiskAdverse100

I'm afraid that silvercar is wrong.

In these circumstances there are two transactions and tax is payable on both.

See the following link (3.2 is the relevant section)

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/so/sdlt6-0705ims.pdf

RiskAdverse100

silvercar

Riskadverse , thats what I thought originally and stated in my now deleted post. After Distilled's comment I dug around on tax forums and found different information!