Stamp Duty Calculator

How to use

Enter the price and pick the state the property is in — that is the single most important input, because duty is levied by the states and their rates are nothing like each other. Then set the three things that change the scale you are charged on: whether you will live in it, whether it is your first home, and whether you are a foreign purchaser.

The result shows the total, the band-by-band working behind it, and what the identical purchase would cost in every other state and the ACT. Read the band table rather than skipping it: it is both the answer to the question most people get wrong and the thing to check the figure your conveyancer quotes against.

Stamp duty is a state tax, not a federal one

There is no such thing as Australian stamp duty. Each state levies its own transfer duty under its own legislation, sets its own rates, and indexes its own thresholds:

• New South Wales — transfer duty, collected by Revenue NSW. Top marginal rate 7.00%, foreign purchaser surcharge 9%, with no owner-occupier concession.
• Victoria — land transfer duty, collected by State Revenue Office Victoria. Top marginal rate 6.50%, foreign purchaser surcharge 8%, with an owner-occupier scale (principal place of residence concession).
• Queensland — transfer duty, collected by Queensland Revenue Office. Top marginal rate 5.75%, foreign purchaser surcharge 8%, with an owner-occupier scale (home concession).
• South Australia — stamp duty, collected by RevenueSA. Top marginal rate 5.50%, foreign purchaser surcharge 7.00%, with no owner-occupier concession.
• Western Australia — transfer duty, collected by Department of Treasury and Finance (RevenueWA). Top marginal rate 5.15%, foreign purchaser surcharge 7.00%, with an owner-occupier scale (concessional rate (home up to $200,000)).
• Tasmania — property transfer duty, collected by State Revenue Office of Tasmania. Top marginal rate 4.50%, foreign purchaser surcharge 8%, with no owner-occupier concession.
• Australian Capital Territory — conveyance duty, collected by ACT Revenue Office. Top marginal rate 4.54%, no foreign purchaser surcharge, with an owner-occupier scale (eligible owner-occupier rate).

The Australian Taxation Office is not in that list, and that is not an oversight. The ATO collects income tax, GST and capital gains tax; it has no authority over transfer duty and publishes no rate table you could check a duty figure against. If a stamp duty page cites the ATO, it is naming a body that contributed none of the numbers on the screen.

What that means in dollars: the same $850,000 purchase by an investor costs $32,437 in New South Wales, $46,070 in Victoria, $31,275 in Queensland, $40,580 in South Australia, $34,890 in Western Australia, $33,435 in Tasmania, $28,100 in Australian Capital Territory. That is a spread of $17,970 — Victoria charges 1.6× what Australian Capital Territory does — on a house at the same price. No official calculator shows you that, because each revenue office only knows about its own tax.

How the bands work

Duty is a slab tax in the same sense income tax is: each slice of the price is charged at its own rate, and reaching a higher band does not re-tax the money underneath it. On $850,000 in New South Wales:

• 1.25% on the $18,000 up to $18,000 = $225
• 1.50% on the $20,000 between $18,000 and $38,000 = $300
• 1.75% on the $65,000 between $38,000 and $103,000 = $1,138
• 3.50% on the $284,000 between $103,000 and $387,000 = $9,940
• 4.50% on the $463,000 between $387,000 and $850,000 = $20,835

Total: $32,437 — an effective rate of 3.82%, even though the top band reached is 4.50%. Multiplying the whole price by that top rate would give $38,250, which overstates the bill by $5,813. Because New South Wales indexes its thresholds each 1 July, the band edges above are this year's and will move.

Flat bands: Victoria and the ACT

Between $960,000 and $2,000,000, Victoria charges 5.50% of the entire dutiable value rather than of the amount above the threshold. The SRO's own table says so: every other row reads “$X plus Y% of the excess” and that one reads “5.50% of the dutiable value”.

The consequence is a genuine notch, not a rounding artefact. At $960,000 the duty is $52,670. At $960,001 it is $52,800 — $130 more duty for one more dollar of price. If you are negotiating a Melbourne purchase anywhere near $960,000, that threshold is worth more than most of what happens in the negotiation, and the calculator flags it when you cross it.

Above $2,000,000 the published rate is a fixed amount plus 6.50% of the excess — and that fixed amount is exactly the flat band evaluated at its own ceiling, which is what makes the handover continuous.

The ACT does the same thing at the top of its scale: above $1,455,000, duty is a flat 4.54% of the whole value rather than a rate on the excess. Both of the ACT's scales — owner-occupier and investor — converge on that flat rate, so the owner-occupier saving disappears entirely on a purchase above $1,455,000.

Owner-occupier concessions

Whether living in the property saves you anything depends entirely on the state, and the three answers have almost nothing in common:

• Queensland: the home concession is a separate, cheaper scale with no upper price limit. On $850,000 it takes duty from $31,275 to $24,100 — a saving of $7,175 that keeps working however expensive the house is.
• Victoria: the principal place of residence concession is also a separate scale, but it stops at $550,000. At the cap it is worth $3,100; one dollar over, the general scale applies to the whole value and the saving is gone. Another cliff, in the same state as the flat band.
• New South Wales: nothing. An owner-occupier and an investor pay identical duty. Only first-home status moves the number in New South Wales.

First-home relief, state by state

Every state does this differently — by exemption, by a separate scale, by a stepped deduction, or not at all for an established home — which is why a figure quoted by a friend interstate tells you nothing about your own bill.

• New South Wales — First Home Buyer Assistance Scheme: no duty at all up to $800,000, which is worth $30,187 at the cap, then a taper to $1,000,000.
• Victoria — First home buyer duty exemption: no duty up to $600,000, worth $31,070, then a taper to $750,000.
• Queensland — First home concession: a deduction subtracted from the concessional duty in steps of $1,735, up to $17,350. The top step exactly cancels the home concession at $700,000 — duty $0 — and the relief fades to nothing below $800,000. On QRO's own worked example of $795,000: $21,625 of concessional duty less a $1,735 deduction = $19,890. Queensland also exempts a new home or vacant land outright, at any value.
• Western Australia — First home owner rate of duty: nil up to $600,000, then 16.15% of the value over it, up to $800,000. Unlike NSW and Victoria, WA publishes the formula, so the calculator gives the real figure across the whole range — $16,150 at $700,000 instead of $27,265.
• South Australia: full relief at any price, but only for a new home, an off-the-plan apartment or land to build on. An established home gets nothing.
• Tasmania: Tasmania's first home buyer exemption for established homes ended for transfers settling after 30 June 2026.
• Australian Capital Territory: The ACT's Home Buyer Concession Scheme can remove duty entirely, but it is income-tested — check eligibility with the ACT Revenue Office. Owner-occupiers who don't qualify still get the lower owner-occupier scale.

Where this calculator stops, and why

Between $800,000 and $1,000,000 in New South Wales, and between $600,000 and $750,000 in Victoria, first-home duty is tapered by a formula neither revenue office publishes in a form we can cite — both send you to their own calculator instead. So in those two ranges this tool shows you the full duty, labelled explicitly as a ceiling, and links out to the official calculator. Your real bill is somewhere between zero and the figure shown.

That is a deliberate refusal rather than a gap we have not got to. A linear taper is easy to invent and would look entirely plausible, and it would be wrong by thousands of dollars in exactly the price band the buyers who most need the number are shopping in. Revenue NSW and the Victorian SRO will each give you their own answer for their own scheme.

The foreign purchaser surcharge

If you are a foreign person for duty purposes, each state adds a flat percentage of the whole dutiable value on top of ordinary duty: 9% in New South Wales, 8% in Victoria, 8% in Queensland, 7.00% in South Australia, 7.00% in Western Australia, 8% in Tasmania, 0% in Australian Capital Territory. Two features of it surprise people, and both cost money:

• It is charged on the whole value, not in bands. On $850,000 in New South Wales the surcharge alone is $76,500, against $32,437 of ordinary duty — the total becomes $108,937, more than 3× the duty a resident would pay.
• No concession reduces it. A foreign first-home buyer under the $800,000 NSW exemption pays no base duty and still owes the surcharge in full.

“Foreign person” is defined by each state's duties legislation and is not the same test as tax residency — temporary visa holders are frequently caught. If there is any doubt about your status, get it confirmed before you exchange, not after.

Budgeting for the whole purchase

Duty is cash due at settlement and cannot be rolled into your loan, so it belongs in the same column as your deposit rather than in your monthly costs:

• The monthly side. Once the price is settled, work out the repayment and the total interest over the loan term — that decides whether the house is affordable, while the duty decides whether you can settle at all.
• Saving toward the deposit. If settlement is still a year or two away, projecting a regular savings plan tells you whether the deposit plus duty is reachable on the timeline you have in mind.
• The rest of the settlement pot. Beyond duty and deposit: transfer and registration fees, conveyancing, building and pest inspections, lender fees, and possibly lenders mortgage insurance. Land tax then applies annually if the property is not your home.

Tips and common mistakes

• Check the state before anything else. Interstate advice about stamp duty is almost always wrong — the rates, the concessions and the mechanisms all differ.
• Don't multiply the price by the top rate. Duty is charged slice by slice everywhere except inside Victoria's flat band, and the flat-rate assumption overstates the bill everywhere else.
• Mind Victoria's two cliffs. $550,000 for the owner-occupier scale and $960,000 for the flat band. Both are worth real money for a dollar of price.
• Ask about new builds in Queensland. A first-home buyer purchasing a new home or vacant land is exempt outright at any value — a materially different answer from the stepped deduction on an established house.
• Don't confuse duty relief with a grant. First home owner grants are separate cash payments with their own eligibility tests, and this calculator does not model them.
• Treat the taper ranges as a ceiling. If the tool tells you the figure is an upper bound, it means the state has not published the formula — go to the revenue office's own calculator for the real number.