The true cost of buying a home
Ask most people what they need to buy a home and they'll tell you the deposit. Ten per cent, maybe five if they've read about the schemes, and the better informed might even say zero per cent. But for most people, it’s the number that gets quoted, planned for, saved towards. It's also only half the story.
The deposit is the headline, however, not the bill.
Say you're buying at £250,000 with a 10% deposit. That's £25,000, and it's the figure most buyers would fixate on. But the deposit is the one cost the seller actually sees. The others are more quiet, mostly arriving in the final weeks, and they're the ones that catch people short.
Stamp duty
This is the big one. From 1 April 2025, first-time buyers in England pay no stamp duty on a home up to £300,000; on a home between £300,001 and £500,000, you pay 5% on the slice above £300,000; and above £500,000 the relief disappears entirely, so you pay the standard rates on the whole price (as at June 2026). In practice, a first-time buyer at £350,000 pays £2,500. At £425,000, it's £6,250. This is worth knowing before falling in love with a property just over a threshold. Our SDLT calculator will give you a swift number here.
Other costs
Then there are the smaller costs that add up. None of these is large on its own; together they matter.
As a rough guide: conveyancing and legal work, often £1,000 to £1,500 plus VAT and disbursements; local searches, around £250 to £450; a survey, from roughly £400 for a homebuyer-level report to more for a full building survey; a mortgage product or arrangement fee, anywhere from nothing to about £1,500 (sometimes addable to the loan); a bank transfer fee on completion; and removals, commonly £300 to £1,200. Buildings insurance needs to be in place from exchange if a house is being bought, not on move-in.
A figure to aim for
Add it all up and the "extra" on a £250,000 purchase can be anything around £3,000 to £6,000 beyond the deposit, before furniture, before a single tin of paint.
So the honest planning figure isn't a deposit. It's the deposit if you’re paying one, plus buying costs, plus a buffer for the first month in a home that might just need one more thing.
Save for the deposit, by all means. Just don't let it be the only number on your spreadsheet. The buyers who reach completion calmly are the ones who were aware of the full figure from the start even before their conveyancer set the main ones out.