We’ve just bought our first home – can we get a stamp duty rebate?

Q My husband and I have just gone through the process of buying our first home. After 10 years of renting and saving, we exchanged on a two-bedroom terrace in London on 16 September. We paid £18,500 in stamp duty. Had we waited a week, our bill would have been less than a third of this. Do we have any recourse? Is there any possibility of a rebate? I know the chances are slim, but it is pretty devastating to be stung for thousands of pounds over a matter of a few working days.
AM

A I may be missing something here, but if you merely exchanged contracts on 16 September 2022, the only money that would have changed hands should have been the deposit that buyers have to pay and which sellers get to keep if you pull out of the purchase.

Stamp duty is a tax paid by homebuyers in England and Northern Ireland, based on the value of the property they are buying. On 23 September the government confirmed a permanent change to how the tax works, with the threshold at which buyers have to pay the duty rising from £125,000 to £250,000.

Previously, the first £125,000 of a property’s value was tax-free. Buyers were then charged 2% of the value of the property above that threshold up to £250,000, and 5% on the portion between £250,001 and £925,000.

Stamp duty land tax (SDLT) doesn’t have to be paid until up to 14 days after the completion of a purchase, which is when you pay what’s left of what you agreed to pay for the property. So if your solicitor jumped the gun in paying SDLT on your behalf, I suggest you ask him or her to get your money back. That way, when you complete, you’ll get the benefit of the increase in the SDLT nil-rate band from £125,000 to £250,000 and of the first-time-buyer exemption going up from £300,000 to £425,000.

However, if – rather than exchanging contracts – you completed on 16 September 2022, there’s not much you can do apart from kicking yourself for not guessing that Liz Truss would home in on cutting SDLT as one way of tackling the cost of living crisis.