How much stamp duty do you pay on a development site?

Transfer duty — stamp duty — is charged on the dutiable value of the land you are acquiring, on a marginal scale: a base amount at the bottom of the bracket plus a rate for every $100 above it. A foreign purchaser pays a second, separate charge on the full value on top.

The calculator covers New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia on the general scale — the one that applies to a company buying land to develop. It runs the same duty engine that prices the Land tab of a feasibility inside UpScale.build.

Every state publishes several duty scales side by side. The one this calculator uses is the general, non-principal-place-of-residence scale, because a development site is bought by a company to build and sell, and never qualifies for the owner-occupier or first-home scales printed next to it in the same table.

That choice matters more than it sounds. The first-home and owner-occupier scales are the ones most public stamp duty calculators default to, which is why a duty figure copied off a consumer calculator into a feasibility is usually too low.

The rates are not typed into the calculator. They live in shared schedule files that both this page and the product read, each carrying the date it was last checked against the revenue office: NSW, Victoria and Queensland verified 2026-08-09, Western Australia verified 2026-08-11. The result panel repeats the date for whichever state you select.

NSW is the only one with more than one vintage. Revenue NSW re-indexes every threshold to CPI on 1 July and the rate year is set by the contract date, so the file holds a 2025-26 and a 2026-27 entry and the calculator picks the one covering today. Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia each carry a single current scale.

Two rounding rules are encoded because the revenue offices publish them: Queensland and Western Australia round the excess over each threshold up to the next $100 (“per $100 or part of $100”), and Victoria’s $960,000 to $2,000,000 band is 5.5% of the whole dutiable value rather than a marginal step.

Each state charges its own surcharge on the full dutiable value, on top of transfer duty, when a foreign person acquires residential land. Every one of the four defines residential land to include land on which residential premises will be built, so a residential development site is generally caught — vacant land is not a way around it.

The rates are NSW surcharge purchaser duty 9% (8% until 31 December 2024), Victorian FPAD 8%, Queensland AFAD 8% (7% before 1 July 2024) and Western Australian foreign transfer duty 7%. Queensland and Western Australia both operate relief for significant residential developments — Queensland by ex gratia relief for schemes of 20 or more residential lots under Public Ruling GEN012.1 — so check eligibility rather than assuming the surcharge simply applies or simply does not.

A $2,400,000 development site in New South Wales, bought by an Australian company on a contract dated in the 2026-27 rate year.

The surcharge nearly triples the acquisition duty on the same site. That is why it belongs in the feasibility before the offer, not in the settlement statement after it.

It does not price South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT or the Northern Territory: those schedules are not encoded, and a confidently wrong duty is worse than an admitted gap. It applies no first-home or owner-occupier concession. It does not model landholder duty on an acquisition of shares or units in a land-rich entity, corporate reconstruction relief, or the NSW premium duty apportionment for mixed-use land — the NSW premium step is charged on residential land only, and the calculator applies the schedule to the whole value.

Duty is one line in an acquisition. The residual land value calculator shows what the site can carry in total, and feasibility software describes where acquisition costs sit in a full appraisal.