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Where a taxpayer buys a property and submits a Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) return, they have two options to reclaim any overpaid tax:

• Make an amendment to the return to reclaim the overpayment within one year of the filing date; or if too late for that.
• Make an overpayment relief claim (paragraph 34, Schedule 10, FA 2003) within four years of the effective date of the transaction as long as none of the seven cases A to G found in paragraph 34A apply.

April 2025 brought with it two SDLT decisions relating to the availability of overpayment relief.

In (LLO), the Upper Tribunal confirmed, in the context of the now defunct multiple dwellings relief (MDR), that where no claim for relief is made in an SDLT return and the taxpayer is out of time to amend the return, overpayment relief is not available. This was because Case A in paragraph 34A prevents overpayment relief where the taxpayer has made a mistake consisting of failing to make a claim. A mistake was held to arise where a “person’s act or omission gives rise to an unwanted outcome� whether or not the act or omission arose from ignorance of the SDLT rules.

In (Candy), the outcome was different, but so were the facts. The taxpayer had initially paid SDLT on the substantial performance of a contract but 20 months later this contract was rescinded prior to its completion. The taxpayer amended the SDLT return to recover the tax paid. They also claimed overpayment relief in the alternative (correctly foreseeing that HMRC would argue that any amendment was too late).

Regarding the attempt to amend the return, section 44(9) FA 2003 (worded very similarly to the rule for an MDR claim) states that a repayment “must be claimed in an amendment of a land transaction return in respect of the contract.� The Court of Appeal in had confirmed that the legislation could not be construed more widely to cover late amendments so here the taxpayer lost and was therefore unable to make an amendment.

Consequently, the overpayment relief claim was the subject of the current First-tier Tribunal (FTT) decision. HMRC did not pursue the Case A argument presumably because they were satisfied that there had been no mistake, it just had not been possible for the taxpayer to claim the relief because what triggered the right of repayment fell outside of the period for claiming. Instead, HMRC focussed on the fact that overpayment relief was not due because the specific wording of section 44(9) meant that there was no other method of claiming relief.

Judge Tilakapala concluded that the purpose of paragraph 34 was to provide a final ‘back-stop remedy� when no other remedy exists so a claim under paragraph 34 is potentially available where a taxpayer is out of time otherwise to reclaim overpaid SDLT and has been unable to reclaim the SDLT in any other way. He added that this was not contrary to the decision in LLO (only the FTT decision was available at the time, but no error of law was found by the Upper Tribunal), as the judge in that case found that the MDR claim rules did not preclude an overpayment claim per se, but Case A applied on the particular facts in LLO (as the taxpayer could have claimed relief but for ignorance of the rules).