Today you pay income tax, National Insurance, VAT, council tax and a long tail of duties. This is a Year 1 comparison. Under our policy you would pay one annual charge on the land you own, plus a single flat rate of income tax, and your pay would rise as taxes charged directly on employing you disappear. Fuel duty stays. Longer-term growth is shown separately and never counted in your Year 1 result.
Who gains, who loses
Year 1 at 5.0% on land value and a flat 20% income tax, applied to ten recognisable households, best off first. Click any of them to load their figures into the calculator below, where you can change the rates and enter your own.
Year 1 only, the higher pay that follows scrapping employer National Insurance and corporation tax is included; long-run growth is not. Retired owners can defer the charge against the home. Three households lose, and we do not hide any of them: the landlords holding £2.5 million of ground; the overseas investor with £600,000 parked in an empty flat, who pays almost nothing to hold prime land out of use today; and the family in a central London council house, whose home would be charged as the near-£900,000 site it is. That charge falls on the council, which has no margin to absorb it, so most of it reaches the rent, meaning much higher rent, help with housing costs, or a move somewhere the ground is cheaper.
Check your own position
Enter your own figures and move the rates to see the whole costing behind the numbers above.
Your household
Enter your own figures below. Keep earnings and house price consistent with one another, a household on median pay does not live in the average-priced home.
Policy rates
Year 1 starts at 5% on land value, about 3.5% of a typical house price, since the building is never charged, and a flat 20% income tax. This gives most households an immediate gain. The full-rate transition is shown separately; move the sliders to test either stage.
Offsets we count, and why
Scrapping taxes does not only lose revenue. It removes spending the taxes made necessary, and it raises wages. Turn each offset off to see the effect.
Why this figure?
Why only 1.5% for VAT? The 2025 round of American tariffs, an average rate of roughly 15%, is put by independent modellers at a permanent 0.3 to 0.4% of output. VAT raises about three times as much revenue as those tariffs, which scaled by revenue implies about 1%. VAT is also not quite a tariff: it is charged on imports and rebated on exports, so it does not tilt trade the way a tariff does. What it does do is tax every stage of domestic exchange, distort what people buy, stop small firms growing past the registration threshold and cost the private sector about 0.3% of GDP in paperwork. UK general-equilibrium work puts the marginal excess burden of consumption and production taxes near 50p per extra pound raised, which would justify claiming far more than we do.
Your Year 1 gain
£23,747a year
Tax bill today (on the pay you entered)£36,872
Single Tax bill (same pay)£18,515
Tax saving£18,357
Plus Year 1 pay returned from employment taxes£5,390
Change in money in your pocket+£23,747
Plus £6,737 of Year 1 higher pay (7.5%): £6,737 as the taxes on employing you disappear , taxed at 20%
Your tax today
£36,872
Income tax£23,432
National Insurance (your share)£3,811
VAT on everything else you buy£5,328
Council tax£2,160
Other duties & premium taxes£1,627
Fuel duty and VAT on fuel (kept under our policy)£515
Your employer also pays £12,750 of employer National Insurance on top of your salary. We do not add it to your bill, instead it shows up as the pay rise above.
Under the Single Tax
£18,515
Land value charge (5.0% of the land under your home, not the building)£0
Flat income tax (20% of the pay you entered)£18,000
Fuel duty and VAT on fuel (unchanged)£515
No VAT. No National Insurance. No council tax. No stamp duty, insurance premium tax or corporation tax. Estimated Year 1 household pay of £96,737 instead of £90,000.
From renting to owning
A buyer will not pay for a plot what the nation will collect from it every year, so the charge comes out of the price of land. A home changes hands at roughly the value of the building on it, your mortgage covers the bricks, and the land is paid for through the charge instead of the purchase price.
Your rent today
£24,000
a year. This does not fall under the Single Tax, a landlord already charges what the location will bear, so the charge comes out of his rent, not on top of yours.
What the same home sells for
£64,500
the building alone. The land, £150,500 of today's £215,000 price, carries the charge instead.
Owning it costs you
£11,875
a year: £4,350 of mortgage (4.5% over 25 years) plus £7,525 of land charge.
£12,125 a year less than your rent , and you end up owning the home. Once the mortgage is paid off in 25 years, only the charge remains: £7,525 a year, against £24,000 of rent today.
Do the national numbers add up?
At these rates the Single Tax raises about £901bn a year, against £1069bn of spending to fund, receipts of £1105bn less £36bn of spending the tax cuts make unnecessary. This is the Year 1 position, with no long-run growth counted.
84%
Land
£425bn
Social housing
£25bn
Income
£394bn
Duties kept
£57bn
Still to find
£168bn
A gap of £168bn remains at these rates. It would take a land charge of about 6.9% at 20% income tax, or about 29% income tax at a 5.0% land charge, to close it, before any further Pigouvian charges on pollution, congestion, extraction and the airwaves.
Who actually pays the land charge
52% of the charge falls on land nobody lives on, let and empty homes, shops and offices, farmland, and the development sites held back from use. The land under the homes people live in accounts for the rest.
Land under the homes people live in
£215bn
Let, second and empty homes
£90bn
Shops, offices, warehouses and industry
£42bn
Farmland, development land and vacant sites
£78bn
Social and council housing
£25bn
Commercial and rentier land pays first
The £4200bn of land nobody lives on, shops, offices, warehouses, industry, farmland, development sites, let and empty homes, hands over £210bn at 5.0% before a single household is asked for anything. Collect that first and the land under the homes people actually live in would need to pay 8.9% to balance the books at 20% income tax, which is the real question this policy has to answer honestly: the ground people live on is a fifth of the value, so it cannot be spared and still fund the state.
Who owns the ground
By area, not by value. Half of England belongs to well under one per cent of its people, Guy Shrubsole's Who Owns England? Homes and gardens take up a twentieth of the country.
Aristocracy and landed gentry
30.0%
Corporations
18.0%
Oligarchs, bankers and City money
17.0%
Public bodies and the Crown
8.5%
Conservation charities
2.0%
Homes and gardens, everyone else
5.0%
Britain's land rent, the location premium collected every year by whoever holds the title, is worth roughly £360bn a year on a land value of £9.0tn. The state spends £1069bn. Removing the rentier layer in full is worth about 34% of what government costs, which is why a land charge alone cannot fund it and a flat income tax carries the rest. We would rather show you that arithmetic than hide it.
How we work this out
Income tax uses the 2026/27 thresholds: £12,570 allowance, 20% to £50,270, then 40% and 45%, with the allowance tapered above £100,000.
National Insurance is 8% between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2%. Employer National Insurance at 15% is treated as a cost of employing you, so it returns to you as higher pay rather than appearing in your bill.
VAT and other duties are charged on what you spend, not on every pound you keep: we take 10% and 3% of household spending. Households on modest incomes spend all of their take-home pay; the spending share tapers to 55.00000000000001% above £150,000 of take-home pay, because higher earners save, invest and pay down mortgages rather than spending everything.
Council tax is estimated from the value of your home, or from your rent if you rent.
The wage uplift assumes 80% of employer National Insurance and 40% of corporation tax reach wages. The Year 1 estimate counts the immediate change in employment costs. Any wider economic growth takes years and is excluded from the household result above.
Scrapping in-work benefits leaves most working households better off, but not all. Any household that would lose out keeps transitional support, that cost is held back from the £32bn offset. Out-of-work, disability and pensioner support is untouched.
The national check uses £11.91tn of privately held land and buildings, plus £1.01tn of social and council housing revalued from its £485bn book value to what it is worth on the market. It also uses £1.8tn of taxable income before the uplift and £1.10tn of receipts.
The charge is on land only. Your bill is 70% of your property value, the land share, with the building left out, because bricks are created wealth. The ONS put Britain's land at about £8.5tn in 2023, roughly three-fifths of all national wealth, and values the land under dwellings at £5.4tn on its own. The honest limitation is that Britain has no parcel-by-parcel land valuation, so we apply one national land share rather than your street's; a Georgist government's first task is a real valuation roll, which is also what makes empty brownfield land, the planning premium on farmland and underused city sites pay in full.
The optional long-run outlook adds 5.0% to national income over about 10 years, 2% from corporation tax, 1.5% from VAT and 1.5% from taxing land rather than work. The VAT figure is anchored on what independent modellers found the 2025 American tariffs cost, a permanent 0.3 to 0.4% of output at an average rate of about 15%, scaled up for the far larger revenue VAT raises, and it is well short of what the deadweight-loss literature would allow. The gain is claimed once rather than compounded, and land values are held flat even though a richer country bids more for land.
The example households are not averages of each other. Median pay and the average house price belong to different households, so each example pairs earnings with a property value that household could plausibly hold.
Deferral for older owners: a household over state pension age with no earnings can leave the land charge to the property once it is more than 25% of its income. The rolled-up charge is capped at 50% of the home's value and is settled when the home is sold or on death. That is a change in the timing of payment, not an exemption, the nation is still paid, later, out of the land.
Inheritance tax is abolished as well, but it is deliberately absent from both columns here: it falls once, on an estate, and not every year, so no comparison of annual bills can show it honestly.
Renting to owning: we take 70% of a typical home's price to be land (the ONS land figures imply roughly that, nationally). A perpetual annual charge on land is capitalised out of its price, so under the Single Tax a home sells for its building value and the land is paid for through the charge. The mortgage figure is a repayment mortgage at 4.5% over 25 years. Rent itself is assumed unchanged: rents are set by what the location will bear, so the charge falls on the landlord's rental income, not on the tenant.
This is an illustration, not tax advice.
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