Deedsum › Conveyancing fees
Conveyancing
The solicitor's fee, the disbursements and the tax, from official sources and firms' own published prices.
A conveyancing bill is three things stacked together: the solicitor's own legal fee, the disbursements (money they pay out on your behalf, like searches and the Land Registry fee), and the tax. A cheap headline is only ever the first of the three.
Surveys that add the legal fee and the disbursements together put the average cost of buying at about
£1,509 on average to buy, including disbursements and VATA second widely quoted survey gives £1,421 for first-time buyers and £2,182 for home movers, on November 2025 data. Both are third-party estimates, not official figures, and both ultimately come from the same source, so two guides quoting them is one number counted twice. Your own bill can sit well outside either, because the biggest moving part, the tax, is not in them at all.
So here is each of the three, from the bodies that set them and from firms' own published prices. Nobody is going to ring you. It is just the numbers.
Every regulated firm has to publish its price for residential conveyancing on its own website. The prices exist, in public, scattered across hundreds of sites, and nobody keeps an honest cited copy. We read them, quote each one word for word, and write down the day we read it. Across the firms we read the published legal fee runs £500 to £5,500 before VAT across the firms we read.
This is not a league table. Every firm here is required to publish what it charges, so we read what each one publishes, quote it word for word and write down the day we read it. The spread is enormous. What it is not is a league table: a fixed fee, an open range and a worked example are three different promises, and a firm that quotes with VAT in is not dearer than one that quotes with VAT out. Read the basis beside the figure.
Ordered below by firm name, alphabetically. We do not rank these firms, recommend them, or call any of them cheap or dear, and the order never moves for money. Every firm's own page was read on the date at the top of this page.
£1,800 including VAT, of which the purchase fee is £1,500
Ashtons Legal fee £1,800 calculated as follows: Purchase fee £1,500; New Build Property fee £150; Management Company Fee (if applicable) £150
£995.00 plus VAT, £1,194.00 with it
Average Legal Fees Based on a £300,000 property | £995.00 | £199.00 | £1,194.00
£1248 including VAT
Purchase of a £200,000 existing freehold property in Stoke on Trent: Legal fees £1248 inc. vat
From £2,500 plus VAT
Freehold: our legal fees start from £2,500 plus VAT*
£600 to £1850 plus VAT
Range from £600 and £1850* (plus VAT)
£2,000 plus VAT
Purchase fees £2,000+ VAT at 20% (£400) and the following payments to third parties:
£680 plus VAT, £816 with it
Purchase of a freehold registered residential property for £250,000 with a standard mortgage ... Legal Fees £680 + VAT £136 = £816
£1750 plus VAT
an example of a quote are based on a freehold property price of £300,000 and are correct at 1st October 2024 | Legal fee £1750
£1,595.00 plus VAT
Fee (£) | VAT if applicable (£) | Legal fees | 1,595.00 | 319.00
From £2,395 plus VAT
£500,001 - £750,000 | From £2,395
£850 to £1,450 plus VAT
Legal fees charged by JMW (excluding VAT) | £250,000.00 - £349,999.99 | £850.00 - £1,450.00
£4,500 minimum plus VAT
Up to £500,000 | £4,500 minimum fee
£800 to £5,000 plus VAT, or £960 to £6,000 with it
The fees are likely to be in the range of £800 to £5,000 plus VAT (£960 to £6,000 with VAT).
£2,500 to £5,500 plus VAT across the two examples published
Buying a residential property: Freehold | Purchase Price £750,000 | Purchase Price £2,000,000 | Our fees £2,500 to £3,500 | £3,500 to £5,500
£1,200 plus VAT
Purchase transactions for both freehold and leasehold properties | Professional fees | £200,001 to £300,000 | £1,200
£900 to £2,000 plus VAT, or £1080 to £2,400 with it
Purchase of a Freehold Residential Property | From £900-£2,000.00 | £180-£400 | £1080 - £2,400
£1,350 to £3,500 plus VAT
Our conveyancing legal fees will depend on the value of the freehold or leasehold property you are purchasing and will range from £1,350.00 to £3,500.00 plus VAT.
£900 to £3,000 including VAT
Our fees for a typical house purchase range from around £900 (inc. VAT) for a simple transaction to around £3,000 (inc. VAT) for a substantial historic building on unregistered land.
£960 including VAT
Our average legal fees to act on the purchase of a property are £960 inclusive of VAT
£500 to £5,000 plus VAT
Legal Fee: £500 to £5,000 (+20% VAT of £79.80 to £1,000)
£2,225.00 plus VAT
Purchase of a freehold residential property by two people, for £750,000 with a mortgage. Woodfines Legal Fees Purchase: £2,225.00 net, £445.00 VAT
These are not the solicitor's fee. They are fixed costs set by other people, the council, the water company, the Land Registry, that your conveyancer pays for you and passes on. You do not get to shop around for most of them, which is exactly why leaving them off a quote makes the quote look cheaper than the bill.
This is the search that tells you whether the council has a road scheme, an enforcement notice or a tree preservation order on your house. Your council sets the price and you do not get a choice about which council. The cheapest we track charges £74.50 and the dearest charges £263.75 for the same thing. If a quote gives you one national search fee, it is a guess.
Same house, different council: the cheapest full search we track is £74.50 in Manchester and the dearest is £263.75 in Cornwall. Nobody chooses their council.
Which water company covers your house is decided by geography, not by you or your conveyancer, and each one sets its own price for the drainage and water search. The three that publish a price before VAT run from £51.25 to £63.50. It is a small line on the bill and a completely fixed one.
The search that checks for contaminated land, old landfill, flooding and ground stability. One provider publishes a starting price and the rest will not say, so treat this line as a starting point and ask your conveyancer which report they actually order.
This is the fee to register the change of ownership, and it is set by an order of Parliament, not quoted by anyone. It goes up in steps with the price of the property. Your conveyancer will almost certainly lodge it electronically, which is the cheaper column, so that is the figure that should reach your bill. If a quote shows the by-post figure instead, ask why.
And it carries No VAT. Your solicitor's own fee does carry VAT. If a quote adds VAT across the whole total including the Land Registry line, the total is wrong, and it is wrong in their favour. The full scale, band by band, is on the Land Registry fees page.
The search that freezes the register for 30 working days so nobody can slip a charge on to your title between exchange and registration. It costs your conveyancer seven pounds. If it appears on your bill at thirty, that is a mark-up, not a disbursement.
The bankruptcy search, run against each buyer's name because a lender will not complete without it. Six pounds a name electronically. It is charged per name, so a couple is twelve pounds, and that is the whole reason two quotes can differ on this line without either being wrong.
A copy of the register and the title plan, which is how your conveyancer finds out what is actually on the deeds. Seven pounds each electronically. A purchase normally needs a handful, so this is a line of tens of pounds, not hundreds.
Every buyer has to have their identity checked, and firms charge very different amounts for the same electronic check: from ten pounds a person to thirty-five. It is charged per person almost everywhere, so a couple pays twice. Not one of the firms we read put a date on this fee.
In England and Northern Ireland it is Stamp Duty Land Tax, charged in slices: 0% up to £125,000, then 2%, 5%, 10% and 12% on the portions above. Stamp duty in England and Northern Ireland is charged in slices, not all at one rate. You pay nothing on the first £125,000 of the price, then 2% on the slice up to £250,000, and so on up. So a £300,000 house is not taxed at 5%. Anyone who tells you the whole price is taxed at your top rate is either guessing or selling you something.
Scotland does not have stamp duty at all: it has its own tax, set at Holyrood, with different thresholds. Wales has a third tax again, with the highest starting threshold of the three. A calculator built for one country gives a buyer in another the wrong number, which is why any tool that does not ask where the house is should be closed. The full bands for all three, with a calculator that collects nothing, are on the stamp duty page.
Roughly in this order. Early on, your conveyancer runs the identity check and orders the searches, so those disbursements are spent near the start whether or not the purchase completes. The priority search of the register goes in close to the end, because it freezes the register so nobody can slip a charge onto your title between exchange and registration. The legal fee and the remaining disbursements are settled around completion. The tax is due shortly after completion, filed on a return, and the Land Registry fee is paid to register you as the new owner. This is the shape of it, not advice on your own transaction.
A low headline is a legal fee with the other two layers taken off it. The firms themselves show you the gap, on their own pages, if you read past the first number:
Nine hundred and ninety five pounds is the headline and their own estimated total on the same page is £2,259.29. Both numbers are honest and both are published. That gap, between the fee and the bill, is the whole reason this site exists.
A VAT-inclusive worked example on a £200,000 house, with the search pack at £408.80 shown right beside it. That search pack is a third of the fee again, and it is the part nobody advertises.
Two more things worth naming. A quote marked no completion, no fee
can still bill you for the searches, because those are paid out early and are not the firm's to waive. And a site that offers to compare quotes
for you is often not comparing anything; it is selling your phone number to whoever pays for leads. Deedsum has no form, no callback and nothing to sell. We read what firms publish and write down the date.
On dates: Quoted against exactly £300,000, which makes it one of the easiest rows here to use. It also carries the oldest date on the site by some way, and a price marked correct in 2024 is a price worth checking before you rely on it. Their published table starts at half a million pounds. Below that, the price is behind a form that wants your name and number first. That is common, and it is the thing these rules were meant to stop.
No. It is set by an order of Parliament, so it is the same whichever firm you use. Any firm that marks it up is charging you for something it did not set.
Usually because the cheaper one has left the disbursements or the tax off the headline. The legal fee is only the first of three layers, and the search fees alone are set by your council and can differ several times over.
No. Deedsum is an information site with no form, no callback and nothing to sell. We publish what firms publish, quoted and dated, and never collect your details.