About ClearCalc

Who runs it

ClearCalc is run by Qiseda Ltd, a company registered in Scotland (company no. SC897103). The registered office and contact address are at the foot of this page. The site is free to use, carries no advertising today and asks for nothing: the privacy page sets out what that means in practice.

What it works out

Which tax a purchase attracts depends on where the property is. All three are banded, so the price is split into slices and each slice is charged at its own rate. The calculator applies the current bands for the nation you pick and shows the result slice by slice.

• Stamp Duty Land Tax on homes in England and Northern Ireland, Land and Buildings Transaction Tax in Scotland, and Land Transaction Tax in Wales.
• First-time buyer relief where the nation offers it, the higher rates on second homes and buy-to-let, the Scottish Additional Dwelling Supplement, and the SDLT surcharge on buyers who are not UK resident.
• Separate calculators for commercial and mixed-use property and for purchases by a limited company, both of which are charged from their own tables.

What it does not do

It produces estimates for general information. Nothing on the site is tax, legal or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for a conveyancer or a tax adviser. Leases and rent calculations, multiple dwellings relief, linked transactions, trust purchases and the less common reliefs are all outside it. HMRC, Revenue Scotland and the Welsh Revenue Authority publish the rules themselves, and the guides here link straight to them.

Where the rates come from

Every rate on the site lives in a ruleset file in the site's source, one per tax and per property type, checked against gov.uk, revenue.scot and gov.wales. The calculator reads those files, and the rate tables are generated from them when the site is built rather than typed out. Worked examples and prose are the weaker link: on several pages the test suite reads the sentences back and checks their figures against the same files, so a rate change moves the words with the table, but that does not cover every page and a hand-written figure can be left behind.

Each file carries the date its rates took effect and the date the file itself last changed. The second can be later than the first when something outside the standard bands moved, such as a surcharge rate.

A rate that looks wrong, or one that has changed and is not here yet, is the most useful thing anyone can send in. Tell us and it gets fixed.