How Much Is Capital Gains Tax? Worked Examples

Five gains, five outcomes

Reading the table

• Small gain, fully covered: a £2,500 gain sits entirely inside the £3,000 annual exempt amount. No tax, no reporting obligation for the gain itself.
• Basic-rate taxpayer with headroom: a £20,000 gain, with the seller's income low enough to leave their full basic-rate band free, is taxed entirely at 18%.
• Mixed case: a £60,000 gain where only £8,000 of basic-rate headroom remains — most of the taxable gain spills into the 24% band.
• Higher-rate taxpayer: the same £60,000 gain, but the seller's other income already exceeds the basic-rate threshold — the whole taxable gain is at 24%.
• Large portfolio sale: a £150,000 gain for a higher-rate seller shows how quickly the bill scales once the whole gain sits in the 24% band.

What changes the number in real cases

• Joint ownership splits both the gain and the allowance — two owners can mean two £3,000 allowances against one sale.
• Private Residence Relief can remove some or all of the gain if the property was ever your home — see the PRR calculator.
• Allowable costs — buying costs, selling costs, genuine capital improvements — reduce the starting gain before the allowance and rates are even applied (full list on our CGT on property hub).
• Timing the sale for a lower-income year is one of the few legitimate levers over the rate itself — selling in a year with less other income leaves more basic-rate headroom for the gain.

Selling more than one property in a year

Selling two or more properties in the same tax year doesn't get a second £3,000 allowance — only one annual exempt amount applies per person, per tax year, regardless of how many disposals feed into it. Each sale is still reported and paid separately within 60 days of its own completion, but the allowance and the basic/higher-rate split are worked out across the combined total gain for the year, not sale by sale. Selling a second property later in the same tax year can push an otherwise 18%-rate gain into the 24% band, simply because the first sale already used up the basic-rate headroom.

Don't forget the deadline

Whatever the figure comes to, it's due within 60 days of completion, not at the following January's Self Assessment deadline — see our 60-day deadline calculator to fix the exact date, and the Capital Gains Tax calculator to run your own numbers instead of the illustrative ones above.

Why two sellers with the same gain can owe very different amounts

It's worth restating plainly, because it's the single most common source of confusion when landlords compare notes: there is no fixed “CGT bill” for a given gain, the way there is for, say, stamp duty on a given purchase price. The same £60,000 gain can cost one seller £10,260 and another £13,680, purely because of what else they earned that year. Comparing your own bill against a friend's “I only paid X” figure without knowing their income is comparing two different calculations that happen to share a headline gain — ask what their income was before assuming something's wrong with your own number.

This is a guide, not financial, tax or legal advice. Figures are estimates from the published rates and thresholds, which change with each Budget. Your own position depends on facts a guide can't see — check anything that matters against gov.uk guidance or a qualified adviser before you act on it.

gov.uk: Capital Gains Tax rates · gov.uk: Capital Gains Tax allowances · gov.uk: tax when you sell property, all read verbatim 11 Sep 2026. Scenarios are illustrative, not real cases; rates and allowance match site/taxdata.py's CGT dataset with no conflicts found.