The stamp duty holiday is set to be extended by three months as the UK starts to head out of lockdown, a new report claims.
According to a report in The Times, Chancellor Rishi Sunak will be announcing that the stamp duty holiday will now run until the end of June when he unveils his budget plans next week.
The stamp duty break was set to end on 31 March and allows people to save up to £15,000 in tax.
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Sunak has been urged to extend the deadline as house-buyers have been rushing to push their sales through before the end of next month.
Rightmove claims around 100,000 could miss out on the break if the deadline is not pushed back.
Under the scheme, the stamp duty threshold is raised from £125,000 to £500,000 for properties in England and Northern Ireland and increased to £250,000 in Scotland and Wales.
And it's given a boost to the housing market, according to the think tank the Centre for Policy Studies that say house sales are at their highest level since 2007.
According to Sky, Rightmove has also reported that the average number of days for a property to sell fell last year - in November it took an average of just 49 days, compared to 67 the year before.
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The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that there will be 'significant slowing of the housing market' if the stamp duty holiday ends on 31 March. It also said house prices could fall by more than eight percent this year.
But Paul Johnson, Paul Johnson, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told The Times that any extension of the holiday by the government increased the likelihood of it becoming permanently scrapped.
He said: "Supporting house moves is a good way of supporting the economy. There's clearly a risk in extending - people will expect it to be extended again.
"Whenever it's withdrawn you risk a period of stagnation and overblown house prices as you get towards the end. Extensions can become permanent."
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While shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Bridget Phillipson said it was 'the wrong priorities in the middle of the worst economic crisis of any major economy'.
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