Moving house in Scotland: what's different

If you have bought or sold in England before, or you are reading a checklist written there, Scotland will keep surprising you. There is no exchange of contracts. The seller gives you the survey. The tax has a different name, a different collector and a different deadline. And the moment you are legally committed — the moment your insurance has to start, your removals can be confirmed and your date is real — arrives by a different mechanism entirely. None of this is difficult, but every one of these points is where an English checklist quietly gives you the wrong instruction.

This page is the Scottish overlay for the moving house timeline. The admin that is the same everywhere — telling the forty-odd organisations, redirecting post, broadband, the DVLA — is covered on its own pages and doesn't change at the border.

The five things that are actually different

The Home Report: ask for it before you pay for anything

In England the survey is your cost and your decision. In Scotland the seller or their agent has to give you the Home Report within nine days of you asking for it, and it already contains a single survey and valuation, a property questionnaire and an energy report. So the order of operations flips: ask for the Home Report first, read it, then ask your lender what — if anything — it still needs before you commission a survey of your own. People who have moved in England tend to book a surveyor on reflex and pay twice for the same information.

Read it properly, and read it before you are bound. What it finds is your only lever for renegotiating the price or asking for repairs, and that lever disappears the moment the missives are concluded.

Missives: the date isn't real until they're concluded

There is no exchange of contracts in Scotland. Instead your solicitor and the seller's exchange a series of formal letters — the missives — and when they are concluded, both sides are legally bound and the date of entry is fixed. Until that point the date is a plan, not a fact, and three things on the checklist are waiting on it:

• Buildings insurance. From the moment you are bound, the property is your risk — if it floods before you get the keys, the loss is yours, and most lenders make cover from that point a condition of the mortgage. mygov.scot tells buyers to insure from conclusion of the missives unless the missives say otherwise. Have the policy ready to start that day.
• Removals. Confirm the date, addresses and crew in writing once the missives are concluded and never before — a removal booked on a provisional date is a removal you may be paying to move.
• Your money. Scotland has no exchange deposit. Your solicitor will tell you when funds are needed, normally at settlement, and the same warning applies as everywhere: confirm their bank details by ringing a number you already had. An email announcing new account details is the fraud, not the instruction.

LBTT, not stamp duty

The tax on a Scottish purchase is Land and Buildings Transaction Tax, paid to Revenue Scotland, not Stamp Duty Land Tax paid to HMRC. Your solicitor handles the return, but the deadline is different from England's fourteen days: thirty days from the day after the effective date. Thresholds, rates and reliefs are set separately from the rest of the UK and change, which is why the moving house costs page refuses to quote a figure — use Revenue Scotland's own calculator for your purchase rather than any number in a guide.

Council tax: 32 councils, one starting point

Council tax works the same way in Scotland as in England and Wales — two councils, two separate jobs, close the old account and open the new one — but the GOV.UK form most guides point you at is labelled as England and Wales only. In Scotland start from mygov.scot/council-tax/register, which lists all 32 councils. The 25% single-adult discount exists in Scotland too and has to be claimed again at the new address; it does not follow you. The council tax when moving house page has the full sequence, including the overlap where you can be liable at both addresses at once.

What doesn't change

• Registering to vote is gov.uk/register-to-vote everywhere in Great Britain, and a change of address means registering again at the new one — it matters for credit checks as much as elections.
• The DVLA is the same organisation with the same two separate updates — licence and V5C — whichever side of the border you're on.
• Post redirection, broadband, banks, insurers, the GP, the dentist, HMRC, your employer — the whole notification list is UK-wide. It's on who to notify when moving house.
• Renting is where Scotland differs most of all — tenancy law is devolved and the deposit, notice and eviction rules are its own — but that's a different page, and the end of tenancy checklist says so at the top.

A Scottish plan, dated from your own move

MovePlan's checklist doesn't assume England. Every task that differs — instructing a solicitor, the survey, the point you're bound, the tax, the council tax form — says what the Scottish route is in the task itself, with real dates worked back from your own move date, so you're never following an English instruction by accident. The letters are the same thirteen everyone needs, addressed to the right organisations. It's £14.99 once, for a six-month pass. It organises and drafts; you still do the telling.