My husband and I currently rent a house in the village where he is the minister of a local church. This house is not provided by the church and we pay our own rental - we are unable to afford to purchase a property in the village. We will be retiring in the next few years and need to buy a house that will become somewhere to live in retirement as we will not be able to afford to stay in the current rented property. Our thoughts are to purchase somewhere and then rent it out until we are ready to move in. Would we be liable for land transaction tax at the rate of buy-to-let even though it would be our only property, and we plan for it to become our permanent home?  

Arthur Weller replies:  

You mention land transaction tax (LTT), so it sounds as though you are in Wales. If you look at https://gov.wales/land-transaction-tax-guide, you can see that the threshold for a residential property is £180,000, so if you are paying less than this for your new home, there is no LTT to pay.