Grant of Lease Notification: SDLT Changes for Scottish Land Transactions

Archived HMRC guidance on SDLT lease notification

This archived HMRC page gives very little substantive guidance. Its main value is to show that it once formed part of HMRC material on notifying the grant of a lease for SDLT, and to confirm that from April 2015 SDLT stopped applying to Scottish land transactions, which instead fall under Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT).

• The original page was titled “SDLTM18215 – Notification: Grant of a lease: Example 1”, but the actual example is missing.
• You cannot use this archived heading alone to decide whether an SDLT return was needed or how tax on a lease should have been calculated.
• For property in England or Northern Ireland, SDLT may still be relevant to the grant of a lease.
• For Scottish land transactions from April 2015 onwards, SDLT does not apply and LBTT must be considered instead.
• The key practical checks are the location of the property, the date of the transaction, and whether the transaction is truly the grant of a lease.

Scroll down for the full analysis.

SDLT on the grant of a lease: archived Example 1 page

This page relates to an archived HMRC manual heading about notifying the grant of a lease for Stamp Duty Land Tax. The source text itself contains almost no substantive guidance. Its main practical value is to show that the page formed part of HMRC material on lease notifications, and that from April 2015 SDLT ceased to apply to land transactions in Scotland, which instead fall within Land and Buildings Transaction Tax.

What this rule is about

When a lease is granted, the transaction may need to be notified to HMRC for SDLT purposes. Whether a return is required, and how the tax is worked out, depends on the rules applying to leases. Those rules are separate from the rules for a simple freehold purchase.

The archived source heading suggests that this page was intended to give an example of how the notification rules apply on the grant of a lease. However, the scraped content does not include the example itself, so it does not provide the underlying facts, calculation, or reasoning.

What the official source says

The official material supplied says only two things of substance:

• the page was titled “SDLTM18215 – Notification: Grant of a lease: Example 1”;
• the page is archived, and from April 2015 SDLT no longer applies to land transactions in Scotland because those transactions are instead subject to Land and Buildings Transaction Tax.

That means the page should not be read as current guidance for Scottish land transactions after the changeover date.

What this means in practice

If you are looking at a lease of property in England or Northern Ireland, SDLT may still be relevant. If you are looking at a Scottish land transaction from April 2015 onwards, the SDLT lease notification rules are not the governing regime. You would need to consider LBTT instead.

The more limited point is that an archived HMRC manual page title on its own is not enough to determine whether a lease transaction had to be notified, or how any SDLT charge would have been calculated. For that, you would need the actual example or the surrounding legislation and guidance.

So the practical consequence of this source is mainly one of scope:

• check whether the transaction is in Scotland and, if so, whether it falls after the move to LBTT;
• do not rely on an archived SDLT page as if it were complete current guidance;
• identify the actual lease transaction rules that applied at the relevant time and in the relevant part of the UK.

How to analyse it

Because the source text is incomplete, the sensible approach is to start with basic jurisdiction and timing questions:

• Is the property in England, Northern Ireland, or Scotland?
• If the property is in Scotland, did the transaction take place before or after SDLT was replaced by LBTT in April 2015?
• Is the transaction the grant of a lease, rather than an assignment, variation, surrender, or some other dealing?
• Are you trying to work out whether a return was required, how tax was calculated, or both?
• Are you relying on an archived HMRC manual page that may no longer reflect the current position?

Those questions matter because lease taxation is highly dependent on the legal form of the transaction, the location of the land, and the date of the transaction.

Example

Illustration: a tenant takes a new lease of commercial property in Edinburgh in 2016. Even if an older HMRC SDLT manual page discusses notification of a lease grant, that page would not govern the tax treatment of this Scottish transaction in 2016. The starting point would be LBTT, not SDLT, because the source expressly states that SDLT no longer applied to Scottish land transactions from April 2015.

Why this can be difficult in practice

The difficulty here is not so much the legal rule as the incompleteness of the source. A page title referring to an example does not tell you:

• what facts the example used;
• whether it dealt with residential or non-residential property;
• whether any premium, rent, or other chargeable consideration was involved;
• what notification threshold or filing rule was being illustrated;
• how the example fitted into the wider SDLT lease regime.

There is also a risk of confusion where archived SDLT material is read without noticing the territorial change for Scotland. A reader may assume the page still applies across the UK, when the source itself says that Scottish transactions moved to LBTT from April 2015.

Key takeaways

• The supplied source does not contain the actual lease example, only an archived page heading and a Scotland-specific warning.
• From April 2015, SDLT no longer applied to land transactions in Scotland; LBTT applies instead.
• For any lease notification question, you need to check the location of the property, the date of the transaction, and the full underlying rules rather than relying on this page alone.

This page was last updated on 24 March 2026

Useful article? You may find it helpful to read the original guidance here: Grant of Lease Notification: SDLT Changes for Scottish Land Transactions

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