Price transparency for residential conveyancing
The sale and purchase of freehold and leasehold residential property, and mortgages and remortgages. If your firm's website offers this service, Rule 1 of the SRA Transparency Rules sets out exactly what price information the site must publish.
Sources last verified: 2026-08-14.1 — official SRA links are cited in each section.
Does this apply to your firm?
Any SRA-regulated firm whose website offers residential conveyancing to the public. This is the highest-volume specified service and the one the SRA's web sweeps look at most often — conveyancing pricing pages are also the ones marketing teams edit most.
What must be published for residential conveyancing
- Your fee — or an average or range — for each transaction type you offer: freehold sale, freehold purchase, leasehold sale, leasehold purchase, and mortgage or remortgage work. If your fee scales with property value, publish the scale or a worked example, not just a starting figure.
- Whether VAT is payable on your fees and on each disbursement, and whether displayed figures include it.
- Any supplements that commonly apply — leasehold, new-build, shared ownership, help-to-buy, unregistered title — so the headline figure is not misleading.
- Who will do the work: the experience and qualifications of fee earners and their supervisors.
- What the fee includes, and anything a buyer or seller might reasonably expect that it excludes (for example tax advice beyond completing the SDLT return).
- The key stages of a typical transaction and how long each usually takes — instruction to exchange, exchange to completion.
Official source: SRA — Transparency in price and service guidance · Sources last verified: 2026-08-11
Disbursements to describe
Disbursements are costs payable to third parties that your firm handles on the client's behalf. The rule expects them described and priced (or ranged) — for this service that typically means:
- Search fees (local authority, environmental, drainage and water) — a typical bundle cost or range.
- HM Land Registry registration fee (scales with price) and official copies.
- Stamp Duty Land Tax or Land Transaction Tax — flagged as a tax that depends on the buyer's circumstances, with a note on whether you calculate it.
- Electronic money transfer fees.
- Leasehold extras: notice of transfer and notice of charge fees, deed of covenant, management information pack — described as set by the landlord or managing agent, with typical ranges.
For every disbursement, say whether VAT applies to it — mixing VAT-inclusive fees with VAT-silent third-party costs is one of the most frequent findings on otherwise careful pages.
Common gaps on live sites
A “conveyancing from £499” line with no basis, no range and no worked example.
Leasehold quoted at the freehold price, with the landlord and management-company fees appearing only at the quote stage.
VAT silent on third-party fees, or a mixture of inc-VAT and ex-VAT figures on the same page.
An online quote calculator that errors or returns nothing — invisible to the firm until someone actually runs it.
No timescales at all, or a page that predates current Land Registry processing realities.
These are patterns seen across real firm websites — none of them implies bad faith. Pages get edited, calculators break, and requirements written for lawyers get trimmed by marketing. That's an argument for checking the live page regularly, not for blame.
Is your residential conveyancing page still saying what it should?
FirmProof runs automated monitoring checks against your live public pages every week and keeps dated evidence of what was found. Start with the free scan — no account, one scan a day.
Check your own site