First home buyers are playing Australia's stamp duty postcode lottery even if they don't realise it, writes Anish Puri.
Two first home buyers sign contracts on the same Saturday for the same kind of home at the same price, $750,000.
One is in Canberra and pays no stamp duty at all. One is in Melbourne and pays about $40,070. Neither did anything differently. They just live on different sides of a state line.
That is the quiet lottery underneath Australia's housing debate.
We argue endlessly about prices, interest rates and supply, and seldom about the fact that the single largest upfront tax a first home buyer pays is set by eight different governments with eight different ideas of who deserves relief, and that nobody publishes the eight side by side.
So here they are, for an established home, as the rules stand this month.
The eight systems
Australian Capital Territory: From 1 July 2026, eligible first home buyers pay no conveyance duty at any price. The old income test and the old price cap are gone. It is the first jurisdiction to simply abolish the tax for this group.
New South Wales: A full exemption up to $800,000 and a sliding concession to $1,000,000, new or established, in place since July 2023. Generous by national standards, though Sydney's median means many buyers still land above it.
Western Australia: For transactions from 7 May 2026, no duty to $600,000 and a reduced rate to $800,000, statewide. At $750,000 a first home buyer pays $24,225, down from the full rate but a long way from zero.
Victoria: Exempt to $600,000, concession to $750,000, unchanged since 2017 while Melbourne's median moved past both numbers. At $750,000, the concession has run out and the buyer pays the standard duty of about $40,070, the highest of any capital city for a buyer at that price.
Queensland: Since May 2025, no duty at all on a new home or land to build on, with no price cap. For established homes, no duty to $700,000, phasing out below $800,000, and from 1 August 2026 a citizenship or permanent residency requirement that did not exist before.
South Australia: Duty-free on a new build with no price cap, and full duty on every established home. A buyer of a $750,000 established house in Adelaide gets nothing. The same buyer of a new build gets everything.
Tasmania: Until 30 June 2026 Tasmania exempted first home buyers from duty on established homes up to $750,000. That exemption ended and was not renewed in the 2026-27 budget. A Hobart first home buyer now pays full duty on an established home, one of the few groups in the country whose position went backwards this year.
Northern Territory: No general first home buyer duty concession. Only house and land packages bought from the builder in a single transaction are duty-free.
Line them up at $750,000 and the range for an established home runs from $0 in Canberra and Sydney, to $24,225 in Perth, to about $40,070 in Melbourne, to the full standard rate in Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin.
The buyer is identical. The tax is not.
Why the states like it this way
Stamp duty is one of the states' largest own sources of revenue, and first home buyer concessions are the cheapest political product in the catalogue: each one is a press release, an eligibility line and a threshold that quietly erodes as prices rise.
Victoria's $600,000 exemption was generous in 2017. It was not indexed, and eight years of price growth have done the government's budget repair for it without a single announcement.
The genius of eight separate systems is that no buyer can see the whole board. A Melbourne family does not know their Canberra cousin paid nothing. A Hobart buyer does not know their exemption vanished in a budget paper while the grant that sits beside it survived.
And because comparison requires reading eight revenue office websites written in eight dialects of legalese, almost nobody does it.
The one national layer and what it shows
There is exactly one part of the first home buyer system that is national.
On 1 October 2025, the federal government's First Home Guarantee became the Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme: no income caps, no place limits, and price caps up to $1,500,000 in Sydney. It lets buyers purchase with a 5 per cent deposit and no lender's mortgage insurance.
Its existence proves that a national setting is possible.
Its design proves the point of this article: the Commonwealth solved the deposit side of the problem uniformly across the country, and left the duty side to eight governments that will not even agree on whether a first home buyer should pay the tax at all.
The Canberra experiment
The ACT's abolition is the natural test case.
From 1 July 2026, it charges first home buyers nothing, at any price, with no means test. Critics will say that is a gift to wealthy buyers. Supporters will say the means test was a bureaucratic tax on ordinary couples who earned slightly too much.
Either way, the territory has done what no state will: made the tax simple enough that every buyer knows exactly where they stand.
Buyers in the other seven jurisdictions know where they stand too, once someone lines the rules up for them.
They stand wherever the border happens to fall.
Anish Puri is the founder of NestPath (nestpath.com.au), a free education platform for Australian first home buyers that maintains the current first home buyer grant and stamp duty settings for every state and territory. Based in Perth, he writes on housing affordability using original analysis of government data. linkedin.com/in/anishpuri-nestpath.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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