Conveyancing fees in Scotland
The solicitor’s fee is the part everybody asks about and it is rarely the biggest number. Buying a house at £250,000 costs around £3,990 on top of the price, and only about a quarter of that is the solicitor. Here is the whole bill, item by item.
Scottish conveyancing is priced in two quite different halves. The solicitor’s fee is a commercial charge that varies by firm and is negotiable. Everything else — registration dues, tax, searches — is fixed by statute or by a third party and is the same wherever you instruct. Firms quote the first and often leave the second to be discovered later, which is why so many people feel ambushed at settlement.
What Scottish solicitors charge
The following ranges are taken from the published price lists of two Scottish firms, read on 14th August 2026. Firms are not named, and VAT is added to all of these figures at twenty per cent. Published fees change without notice, so treat these as an indication of the market rather than as a quotation.
| Price of property | Purchase, range published | Sale, range published |
|---|---|---|
| Up to £100,000 | £695 to £750 | £695 to £725 |
| £100,001 to £150,000 | £775 to £795 | £775 to £795 |
| £150,001 to £200,000 | £810 to £850 | £775 to £850 |
| £200,001 to £300,000 | £825 to £1,100 | £825 to £1,100 |
| £300,001 to £500,000 | £900 to £1,250 | £875 to £1,250 |
| £500,001 to £700,000 | £1,000 to £1,595 | £950 to £1,595 |
| £700,001 to £1,000,000 | £1,300 to £1,950 | £950 to £1,950 |
Two firms price differently again. One firm publishes a range rather than a scale, from £995 plus VAT for a simple transaction to £5,000 plus VAT for a large or complicated one, for both purchases and sales. Another, in Inverness, starts at £995 plus VAT and caps the fee at half of one per cent of the price plus VAT, which is a useful structure to know exists if you are buying at the upper end.
A banded scale and a percentage cap produce very different bills on an expensive house
At £800,000, a firm charging a flat band may want £1,950 plus VAT while a firm capping at half of one per cent could charge up to £4,000 plus VAT. At £150,000 the same two structures land within a hundred pounds of each other. Ask which structure the firm uses before you compare quotations.
Registration dues, which nobody negotiates
Registering the deed that transfers ownership is a statutory fee paid to Registers of Scotland, set by band according to the consideration paid. It is identical whichever solicitor you use.
| Consideration paid | Fee |
|---|---|
| Up to £50,000 | £80 |
| £50,001 to £100,000 | £140 |
| £100,001 to £150,000 | £260 |
| £150,001 to £200,000 | £400 |
| £200,001 to £300,000 | £530 |
| £300,001 to £500,000 | £660 |
| £500,001 to £700,000 | £800 |
| £700,001 to £1,000,000 | £930 |
| £1,000,001 to £2,000,000 | £1,100 |
| £2,000,001 to £3,000,000 | £3,300 |
| £3,000,001 to £5,000,000 | £5,500 |
| £5,000,001 or more | £8,250 |
The figures above are the standard rate on an ordinary sale. Voluntary registration, where an owner registers a title that is not being sold, is charged at a lower rate — £400 rather than £530 at the £250,000 band.
Alongside that, registering a standard security — the deed securing your mortgage — costs £80 for each title sheet affected, reduced to £60 where a discharge is done through the digital registration service. An advance notice, which protects the transaction against a competing deed being registered in the gap before yours, costs £20, and discharging one costs £20.
Land and Buildings Transaction Tax
Scotland has no stamp duty. The tax on buying property here is Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, it is collected by Revenue Scotland rather than HM Revenue and Customs, and its bands are not the English ones. Guidance written for the United Kingdom as a whole will give you the wrong figure.
| Purchase price | Rate on the part in that band |
|---|---|
| Up to £145,000 | Nil |
| £145,001 to £250,000 | 2 per cent |
| £250,001 to £325,000 | 5 per cent |
| £325,001 to £750,000 | 10 per cent |
| Above £750,000 | 12 per cent |
First-time buyer relief raises the nil rate ceiling from £145,000 to £175,000. It is worth two per cent of the price above £145,000, to a maximum of £600, and you only reach that maximum if you pay £175,000 or more. A first-time buyer at £160,000 saves £300, not £600.
The Additional Dwelling Supplement is eight per cent and it is charged on the whole price, not on a slice of it
ADS applies where the price is £40,000 or more and, at the end of the day of the purchase, you own two or more dwellings and are not replacing your only or main residence. On a £250,000 second property that is £20,000, against £2,100 of ordinary LBTT.
The trap is the timing rather than the rule. Somebody who sells their only home on the same day as they buy the next one owns two dwellings for part of that day and pays nothing. Somebody who buys before selling pays the full eight per cent at settlement and reclaims it afterwards, provided the previous main residence is sold within thirty-six months. The rate rose from six to eight per cent on 5th December 2024 and the repayment window was extended from eighteen to thirty-six months for transactions from 1st April 2024, so older guidance is wrong in both directions.
Searches and reports
A property search and legal report costs in the region of £160. Beyond that, three others appear often enough to budget for: a company search at around £70 where the seller is a company, a Coal Authority report at around £62 in the former coalfields, which covers a great deal of central Scotland and Fife, and a plans report at around £210 where the title boundaries need to be checked against the ground.
The Home Report, which the seller pays for
This is a genuinely Scottish institution with no English equivalent, and it is a legal obligation rather than a marketing choice. Section 98 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 provides that a person who is responsible for marketing a house on the market must possess the prescribed documents — note that the duty falls on whoever is responsible for the marketing, which may be the selling agent rather than the seller. The Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 (Prescribed Documents) Regulations 2008 prescribe what those documents are.
It is universally described as three documents: the Single Survey, the Energy Report and the Property Questionnaire. The Regulations themselves prescribe two — a survey report, of which the energy efficiency information is the second part, and a property questionnaire. The distinction rarely matters in practice but it is why the counting sometimes differs.
Only surveyors registered with or authorised to practise by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors may prepare the survey report, which covers the energy report as well as the single survey. The property questionnaire is completed by the seller or their agent. The report is obtained and paid for before the property goes on the market, and a prospective buyer may request a copy.
Costs vary with the value of the property and are typically quoted excluding VAT, so check which you have been given. Published ranges run from around £240 including VAT on a property under £100,000 to around £1,200 including VAT above £500,000, with most Scottish sellers spending somewhere between £400 and £750. Several Scottish solicitor-estate agents publish a starting figure of between £360 and £520 including VAT.
The regulations also set out exceptions — among them portfolios, seasonal and holiday accommodation, mixed sales, dual use, unsafe properties, new housing, properties due for demolition and newly converted premises. Most ordinary sales fall outside every one of them.
Estate agency, if you use one
Many Scottish solicitors are also estate agents, which is itself unfamiliar to buyers from elsewhere. Published Scottish rates cluster between 0.75 and one per cent of the sale price plus VAT, with a minimum fee around £900 plus VAT, and a separate marketing or advertising charge of roughly £275 to £465. That is materially below the United Kingdom average sole agency fee of about 1.42 per cent including VAT, and the difference is worth knowing before accepting a quotation.
Two worked examples
Both assume a property at £250,000, an ordinary transaction with a mortgage, and a mid-market solicitor’s fee. Neither is a quotation.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Solicitor’s fee, £900 plus VAT | £1,080 |
| LBTT, nil on the first £145,000 and two per cent on £105,000 | £2,100 |
| Registration dues on the disposition | £530 |
| Registration dues on the standard security | £80 |
| Two advance notices | £40 |
| Property search and legal report | £160 |
| Total on top of the purchase price | £3,990 |
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Solicitor’s fee, £825 plus VAT | £990 |
| Estate agency at one per cent plus VAT | £3,000 |
| Marketing and advertising charge | £275 to £465 |
| Home Report | £540 to £720 |
| Discharge of the standard security | £60 to £80 |
| Advance notice | £20 |
| Total | about £4,885 to £5,275 |
The pattern is the same in both directions. The solicitor is between a fifth and a quarter of the bill. Shopping hard on the legal fee and ignoring the estate agency percentage is the wrong way round: one per cent of £250,000 is more than three times the entire conveyancing fee.
Where the Scottish process differs, and why it changes the risk
The costs above are only half the story, because the point at which you become committed in Scotland is not the point at which you become committed in England.
There is no exchange of contracts here. The contract is formed by missives, a series of formal letters between the solicitors, and once missives are concluded both parties are bound. After that point there is no gazumping and no walking away without consequence.
Before that point there is, and this is where the common belief that gazumping does not happen in Scotland goes wrong. An offer being verbally accepted binds nobody. Missives are frequently not concluded until weeks after a bid has been accepted, and in a rising market a seller can take a better offer at any moment until the last letter is issued. What restrains it is not the law but professional conduct: the Law Society of Scotland’s guidance provides that a seller’s solicitor should not accept instructions to accept a competing offer unless negotiations with the original offeror have fallen through for genuine reasons, and should tell the seller to instruct somebody else if they insist. That is a brake on the solicitor, not a bar on the seller, and it is defeated by the seller changing agent.
The practical consequence for your money is straightforward. Everything you spend before conclusion of missives — the Home Report if you are selling, searches, a mortgage valuation, the solicitor’s time — is spent while the deal can still collapse. The risk lasts exactly as long as the gap, which is the argument for pressing to conclude missives early rather than leaving them open. There is more on the mechanics at what missives are and when you are bound.
What to ask for in writing
Ask for a written fee estimate that separates the firm’s own fee from the outlays, states whether VAT is included, and lists the outlays individually rather than as a single rounded figure. Ask whether the fee is banded or percentage-based. Ask what the firm charges if the transaction falls through before settlement, which is the question nobody thinks to ask and the one that occasionally hurts.
Tell us what you are buying or selling and we will pass your details to one of our member firms, who will be in touch. You can check any Scottish solicitor on the Law Society of Scotland’s public roll yourself.
Sources
- Registration fees, Registers of Scotland
- Registers of Scotland (Fees) Amendment Order 2021, legislation.gov.uk
- Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, Scottish Budget 2026 to 2027, Scottish Government
- Residential property LBTT rates, Revenue Scotland
- Additional Dwelling Supplement, Revenue Scotland
- Housing (Scotland) Act 2006, section 98, legislation.gov.uk
- Gazumping, gazundering and closing dates, Law Society of Scotland
- Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 (Prescribed Documents) Regulations 2008, legislation.gov.uk
- Home Reports, Scottish Government
- Home Report, mygov.scot
This page is general information about the law of Scotland and is not advice on your circumstances. Firm prices are those published by the named firms and read on 14th August 2026; they change without notice and are not quotations. Tax rates and registration dues change, usually with effect from 1st April. Check LBTT with Revenue Scotland before relying on any figure.
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