Buyer incentives from 1 July 2026
Stamp duty abolished for first home buyers, and removed on new unit-titled homes for owner-occupiers.
The 2026-27 ACT Budget changed the demand side in ways that bear directly on who buys the product you are modelling. These affect revenue and absorption, not your costs — but they are a genuine selling point when you are pitching a site to a client.
From 1 July 2026
- Stamp duty abolished for all ACT first home buyers, with no property value cap.
- Stamp duty removed on new unit-titled properties bought by owner-occupiers.
- The off-the-plan concession for owner-occupiers continues.
- Exemptions extended to pensioners, NDIS participants, and anyone who has not owned property in the previous five years.
Why it matters to the model
New unit-titled dwellings bought by owner-occupiers are precisely the product a missing middle infill scheme produces. A buyer of a $900,000 new townhouse who would previously have paid tens of thousands in duty now pays none — which is effectively a subsidy to your purchaser, funded by the Territory, that improves both the price you can achieve and the speed at which you achieve it.
Treat this as a documented tailwind on absorption and pricing rather than a number to plug in. It supports the end value assumption; it does not by itself justify raising it.
Before any of this matters, the site has to work
The licence, the charge and the planning pathway are all downstream of one question: is the block worth developing at all? Put an ACT address in and get the zone, the unimproved value, the Lease Variation Charge at two, three or four dwellings, and a verdict on the asking price.
Last reviewed 1 August 2026. Every figure here should be verified against the current instrument — see sources and method.
Other explainers
- The ACT property developer licence
- Building a site out of several blocks
- Residual land value
- Why unimproved value is your floor
- The Lease Variation Charge, and the missing middle remission
- Dual occupancy on an RZ1 block
- The density curve
- The $1.28 rule
- Time is a cost
- Why “DA approved” may be worth nothing
- Former Mr Fluffy blocks
- Reading a Crown lease purpose clause
- What MPA 04 changed on 1 July 2026
- The Pattern Book