Stamp Duty

After completion but before registering, your solicitor, possibly.

Usually it will be included in the completion invoice from your solicitor, together with their fees and Land Registry fee. It will have to be paid in cash (cheque, bank transfer etc), and any payment you make has to be cleared by completion date.

Alec

Where the amount of stamp duty is not large, compared to the solicitor's fee, it may be advanced by the solicitor together with other outlays, and then simply appear, as you say, in his final invoice after the event.

Of course any initial equity you're injecting (generally confusingly called a deposit) is normally required by the solicitor to be paid to his client account in advance, so that funds are cleared into his account, together with the mortgage advance, by the time he pays the seller's solicitor the purchase price. Hence, when stamp duty is non-trivial, a buyer would be expected to beef up his advance payment to include stamp duty.

In a sense there is no Stamp Duty on land transfers! Since 01.12.03 there has been Stamp Duty Land Tax!

So I think the technical answer is that as relevant a SDLT return needs to be filed within 30 days of the relevant date, usually the completion date, and the tax must be paid before the Revenue issue their certificate, and without that certificate the transfer cannot be registered at the Land Registry.

In practice the Solicitor acting for the purchaser will want their hands on the money by the completion date ... to ensure that the transfer can be registered.

A rose by any other name still has the same thorns. There is no real difference between the two, is there?

Indubitably. Unless zero, it can't be less than £600, which is probably more than the solicitor will wish to advance against a new client's word of honour.