Coventry Building Society has reported that ‘second steppers’ are being hit by house price rises which have caused Stamp Duty bills to more than double in seven years.

In the first month since the end of the Stamp Duty holiday, average house prices in England reached £268,349 in October, making the Stamp Duty bill for an average-priced home £3,417.

This is over double the bill faced by homebuyers when the Stamp Duty thresholds were last changed, according to analysis of the latest Land Registry data by Coventry Building Society.

In December 2014, then-Chancellor George Osborne set the existing Stamp Duty thresholds, when the average home cost £203,346 and came with a typical Stamp Duty bill of £1,567.

Despite the Stamp Duty holiday, which was in place from July 2020 until the end of September this year, the latest data from HMRC shows that the Treasury received £10.2bn in Stamp Duty between January and October 2021, higher than the same period in both 2019 (£9.5bn) and 2020 (£6.6bn).

Jonathan Stinton, Head of Intermediary Relationships at Coventry Building Society, said: “For Stamp Duty costs on average-priced homes to have doubled in just under seven years is astonishing.

“This puts an extra financial burden on home buyers, particularly ‘second-steppers’ who won’t benefit from the £300,000 Stamp Duty threshold that first-time buyers do and are already needing to find a significant extra pot of cash to take what’s now a pretty big leap up the property ladder.”