Background
Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT)
Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) replaced UK Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) in Scotland from 1 April 2015. LBTT is a tax applied to residential and commercial land and buildings transactions (including commercial properties and commercial leases) where a chargeable interest is acquired. Chargeable consideration is defined as anything given in money or money’s worth for the subject-matter of the transaction. For example, the chargeable consideration for a house will be the price paid for the property, land and fittings. For leases, chargeable consideration can include rent payable and any premium paid on the lease. Land transactions must be notified to Revenue Scotland, unless the chargeable consideration is less than £40,000, or the transaction is otherwise exempt (such as acquisitions by The Crown or transactions in connection with a court order relating to divorce or dissolution of civil partnership). A full list of exempt transactions can be found on the Revenue Scotland website.
Taxpayers have 30 days to submit a return after the effective date of transaction (usually the date of completion of the conveyancing process). The vast majority of LBTT returns are submitted online via the Revenue Scotland website by agents acting on behalf of taxpayers. The LBTT return includes a range of information about the transaction (e.g. residential vs non-residential, whether the transactions was a conveyance, lease or lease review), tax liabilities and reliefs claimed. Amendments and corrections can be made to LBTT returns up to one year following the filing date.
The LBTT rate that applies to a transaction depends on such as the transaction type (residential, non-residential, leases), when a property was bought, how much was paid for it, and for leases the amount of rent paid under the lease and other chargeable consideration such as the lease premium. The current rates and consideration bands are detailed below. Also note that some transactions may be eligible for full or partial relief of LBTT and more detail of these is given in the Reliefs section of this document.
Current and historic rates and bands
- Residential properties: Residential property | Revenue Scotland.
- Non-residential properties: Non-residential property | Revenue Scotland.
- Leases rates and bands: Lease Transactions | Revenue Scotland
Lease reviews
The Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) provisions require the tenant in a lease that has been notifiable to submit a further return to Revenue Scotland every three years. Reviews should be submitted on every third year anniversary of the effective date of the lease. Revenue Scotland should also be notified of an assignation or termination of the lease. In this publication, “reviews of a lease” include:
- Three-yearly reviews, which inform Revenue Scotland of any changes which have occurred since the effective date or previous review date. Tax chargeable on the lease is reviewed and the new Net Present Value is calculated when the review is submitted.
- Assignations: when a lease is assigned to a new tenant, the outgoing tenant must submit a review within 30 days of the lease being signed, including an assessment of the amount of tax chargeable reflecting any changes since the last return was submitted.
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Terminations: When a lease is terminated, the tenant at the point of termination must submit a return to Revenue Scotland, including an assessment of the amount of tax chargeable reflecting any changes since the last return was submitted.
Additional Dwelling Supplement (ADS)
Additional Dwelling Supplement (ADS) was introduced in 2016. This is an additional charge which applies when the taxpayer is purchasing an additional property and not replacing their main residence. ADS most commonly arises for purchases of a second home or a buy-to-let dwelling. Before 2024/25, this payment could be reclaimed if the previous main residence is sold within 18 months, and the claim is made within 5 years of the submission date. From 1 April 2024, ADS can be reclaimed if the previous main residence is sold within 36 months.
A small amount of ADS applies to non-residential conveyances. Tables 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 only cover ADS declared against residential conveyances, while table 3.4 covers where ADS was declared on residential and non-residential conveyances.
ADS rates have changed through time and are currently set at 8% of the total consideration of a purchase. More information on the rates and when they came into effect is available at the following link: The Additional Dwelling Supplement (ADS) | Revenue Scotland.
Reliefs
There are a number of tax reliefs which provide whole or partial relief from LBTT and ADS. Common reliefs include:
- First-Time Buyer relief, which currently relieves LBTT on the first £175,000 of the consideration payable for first time buyers, subject to conditions.
- Charities relief, where the buyer in a land transaction is a charity and certain conditions are met.
- Group relief, where at the effective date of a land transaction the seller and buyer are both companies in the same group, allowing companies to move property within a corporate group structure without a liability for LBTT being incurred.
Due to known data quality issues with reliefs information collected from LBTT returns, figures in this section are presented as estimates. These issues only impact a small number (less than 1%) of returns and the total figure for LBTT foregone to reliefs is not affected. More details on these issues are given in the Known data quality issues section of this publication.
What this publication covers
The LBTT data presented in this publication comes from LBTT returns submitted to Revenue Scotland. It does not cover transactions where no tax return was submitted, for example, where a transaction was not notifiable.
For the purposes of these statistics, where a tax return has been received, the transaction is assumed to be notifiable. Hence the statistics may include a small number of non-notifiable transactions where a return was received but not actually required.
Figures reported relate to the date on which a return was originally submitted via the Revenue Scotland online portal or on which a paper return was received, not the date of the transaction.
The tax received is not included in this publication, but is monitored closely by Revenue Scotland and information on revenues collected and paid over to the Scottish Consolidated fund is included in Revenue Scotland's Annual Report and Financial Statements Corporate Documents | Revenue Scotland.
Data source
Data is drawn from Revenue Scotland's tax administration system, which holds a record of each version of a tax return submitted. For this publication, all data were extracted as at 31 May 2025 . In keeping with Revenue Scotland’s statistics revisions policy, only data for 2023/24 onwards has been revised to reflect any changes after the returns were submitted.
Revisions policy
Taxpayers may amend returns online up to 12 months after the filing date. In addition, other changes may occur over a longer time period – for example, as a result of a reclaim of the Additional Dwelling Supplement (typically made within 18 months), or as a result of an enquiry where more detailed checks on the information given in a return are carried out by Revenue Scotland. Where amendments have been made, these are applied to the figures for the month in which the original return was received. Consequently, Revenue Scotland's LBTT statistics revisions policy states that figures are initially provisional (subject to revision in newer publications), then finalised after 2 years. It will not be possible to reconcile these figures directly with accounting figures released by Revenue Scotland, as these will have a different reporting methodology.
Date of submission versus effective date
Revenue Scotland’s monthly LBTT statistics and the data in this publication are based on the date the LBTT return is submitted to Revenue Scotland. Generally, this is different from the effective date (generally the data that a land transaction is completed) as taxpayers have 30 days from the effective date to submit their LBTT return. However, nearly three quarters (74%) of returns are submitted within a week of the effective date and 88% within two weeks. A small proportion of returns are submitted later than the required 30 days and are liable for financial penalties.
Revenue Scotland is aware of interest in data by effective date but there are good reasons to publish statistics by submission date. These reasons are:
- No time-lag exists for data produced by date of submission. Publishing data based on the submission date rather than the effective date allows Revenue Scotland to publish monthly LBTT statistics in a timely manner. Around two months would need to be allowed to pass from the month end before statistics relating to that month could be published. This would ensure that 99% of LBTT returns with an effective date relating to that month had been received and would minimise the need for revisions.
- The data will be subject to revision only as a result of changes to the LBTT returns submitted (e.g. a claim for repayment of ADS) and not as a result of the submission of LBTT returns relating to an earlier period (which would be the case for statistics produced by effective date).
- Published statistics include actual values rather than estimates for the most recent months.
- Trends observed in the published data will be broadly the same as those on an effective date basis, with the largest deviations occurring at the ends of the series and near policy changes. It is worth noting that the Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC) also requests data by effective date, which it uses to produce and evaluate forecasts of LBTT revenue. This is because the forecasts are for revenue outturns in Revenue Scotland’s published accounts that are partially based on effective dates (see next section). The data provided allows the SFC to more accurately forecast the revenues for the budget and impact of significant events, such as policy changes. The data includes LBTT returns with an effective date up to and including the month two months prior to the date on which the data were extracted from the tax system. Revenue Scotland subsequently publishes the data provided to the SFC on the LBTT data requests section of its website: Land and Buildings Transaction Tax Statistics | Revenue Scotland
Comparison of published accounts
Revenue Scotland’s LBTT statistics differ from the revenue figures that appear in the Devolved Taxes Account in Revenue Scotland’s Annual Report and Financial Statements (the ‘Annual Report’). The figures in the statistics and Annual Report are produced on a different basis.
The figures in the Annual Report are fixed for a given year at the point at which the accounts are closed, while the published statistics are revised with changes largely reflecting ADS reclaims (and some other amendments) which have been received after the original LBTT tax returns were submitted. After 2 years, figures in the statistics publications are frozen and no longer updated, this is for statistical disclosure control purposes to avoid revealing small changes which might relate to a single transaction.
The Annual Report and published statistics are both based on the date the LBTT return is submitted but with some adjustments made to the Annual Report to accrue revenue for LBTT returns (and claims for repayment of ADS) received in April and May (after the end of the financial year) with an effective date (or sale date for the previous main residence) relating to the previous financial year or earlier. These April/May adjustments typically result in relatively small differences between the Annual Report and published statistics, although the difference was more pronounced in the first year of LBTT (2015/16) because there were no reverse accruals relating to the previous year.
Differences in reported figures are mainly due to the different treatments of claims for repayment of ADS in the Annual Report and published statistics. The published statistics allocate claims for repayment of ADS to the period in which the LBTT return (with ADS declared due) was originally submitted. The accounts published in the Annual Report typically allocate claims for repayment of ADS to the accounting year in which the claim for repayment was received. Therefore, the statistics cover the net tax declared in a year, rather than tax taken. For example, a claim for repayment of ADS received in June 2023 relating to an LBTT return originally received in March 2023 would be allocated to March 2023 (2022/23) in the published statistics and to 2023/24 in the Annual Report. This repayment could not be allocated to 2022/23 in the accounts because the 2022/23 accounts were closed as of 31 May 2023.
There are some other reasons for differences, but these are generally more minor and it is not practical to adjust the statistics for all possible differences. The most significant of these is the impact of the accounting accruals process which attributes revenue in the first two months of the accounting year (April and May) to the previous financial year if the effective date of the relevant transaction was before 1 April. For every financial year there is revenue coming in from April and May of the following year (accruals) and revenue subtracted (reverse accruals) from April and May of the year in question which was included in the accounts of the previous year. The accruals and reverse accruals often roughly cancel out, but for 2019/20 and 2020/21 there were more noticeable difference which in turn resulted in more significant differences between Net LBTT and Devolved Taxes figure for LBTT.
Known data quality issues
Local authority
The local authority in these statistics is determined primarily from the post code of the property postal address or settlement location if postcode is absent. Some LBTT returns are submitted without valid postcode or settlement location. This is more frequent for non-residential returns which often don’t have a postal address.
In previous annual LBTT statistics, the location of properties was imputed (i.e. a method was used to distribute the returns where postcode was missing amongst local authorities or other geographies). Postcode data has improved since 2019 when an address picker was added to the tax return. In this latest publication, we have not imputed the local authority. Instead we have presented information on numbers of returns where local authority is ‘unknown’. In 2024/25 we could not accurately identify the local authority where the property was located in 0.1% (110) of residential conveyances and 5% (350) of non-residential conveyances. We do not publish local authority level data on leases for statistical disclosure reasons, as the numbers are small and could potentially identify individual transactions in some areas.
Reliefs
There are various data quality issues with reliefs information collected from LBTT returns in previous years, although these issues do not affect the total LBTT declared due.
The most common data quality issue affecting total revenue foregone to reliefs is that, prior to the introduction of a new electronic tax system in July 2019, 4% of taxpayers claiming reliefs incorrectly entered the value of the relief claimed as the full consideration - e.g. the total price of the property – rather than the LBTT amount that would be due without reliefs. This means that simply summing the value of reliefs claimed on tax returns would overstate the value of LBTT revenue forgone to reliefs.
The LBTT revenue forgone to reliefs needs to be estimated from other information provided by the taxpayer, and hence the results presented are referred to as estimates. Full details of the methods used to produce the estimates can be found on the LBTT data requests section of the Revenue Scotland website. From 2015/16 to 2018/19, the relief amount was estimated in this way for 10% of returns claiming a relief. Improvements to the tax system have reduced the need to estimate the relief amount, and in 2024/25, the relief amount was estimated for 1% of returns.
Some transactions may be eligible for more than one relief, but only one relief may be recorded by a tax payer. This means that individual reliefs may be underestimated, although this does not affect the total value of tax foregone to reliefs.
It is also worth noting that the estimates are likely to underestimate ADS (and consequently LBTT) revenue forgone to reliefs to some extent. ADS is due on most purchases of a residential property by a non-natural person, such as a company. When a full relief is claimed reducing the LBTT liability to nil, in some cases the ADS has not been declared (rather than declared and reduced to nil by relief). Therefore, although the tax position is correct, it is likely that data on reliefs for residential transactions will underestimate ADS revenues forgone.
Residential/non-residential vs conveyance/lease
A very small number of residential leases are included in the figures and tables relating to leases in this publication. Residential leases are typically exempt from LBTT but in cases where there is a non-residential component to the lease (e.g. a shop below a flat) then LBTT is payable. LBTT due for a lease is the same whether it is residential or non-residential. We do not analyse residential leases separately due to the very small numbers recorded each year.
Non-residential transactions that contain a mixture of residential and commercial elements (‘mixed’ property transactions) are treated as non-residential transactions for LBTT. Again, the overall tax position for the relevant transactions remains correct.
Related publications
Land tax statistics in the rest of the UK
Statistics for other countries of the UK are produced by different organisations. Note that different countries may have different tax rates which should be considered when comparing the statistics.
For Wales, The Welsh Revenue Authority produce statistics on the Land Transaction Tax: Land Transaction Tax | GOV.WALES
For England and Northern Ireland, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) produce the Stamp Duty Land Tax statistics: Quarterly Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) statistics - GOV.UK
Other Scottish property related statistics
Registers of Scotland publishes comprehensive property statistics for Scotland, including sales prices and numbers of new build homes Data and statistics - Registers of Scotland
The Scottish Government publishes a range of housing statistics, including numbers of new homes built, and number of second and empty homes: Housing statistics - gov.scot and summaries statistics and data from a range of providers (including Revenue Scotland) in the Scottish housing market reviews - gov.scot
National Records of Scotland publishes statistics on numbers of households and dwellings in Scotland: Households and Dwellings in Scotland, 2024 - National Records of Scotland (NRS)
Other Scottish property tax statistics
The Scottish Government publishes statistics on council tax and non-domestic rates: Local government finance statistics - gov.scot
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Enquiries
For enquiries about this publication please contact the Revenue Scotland Statistics & Management Information Team:
statistics@revenue.scot