How buying a home with a friend helps beat the 'singles tax'

When Leanne split up with her partner in her late 20s she thought she'd have to put her dream of a buying a home in the area where she grew up on hold.

She was earning a good salary but the properties she was hoping for - with a garden and parking space - were too expensive on her own. While she'd just started seeing someone new, it was very early days - far too early to discuss living together.

Her friend since school, Sarah, was single and renting a room in a shared house in Brighton. She also wanted to move back home to Kent, but was worried about how she'd get on the housing ladder on her cabin crew salary.

When Sarah suggested they buy together, Leanne admits she "totally baulked". But after chatting with a mortgage adviser they went ahead - and say it's helped them avoid the so-called singles tax.

Not being partnered up can mean extra costs. It's tricky to quantify and varies by location - estimates suggest it could be anything from hundreds of pounds to £10,000 on average extra, external a year.

The cost of rent or a mortgage, household bills and subscriptions can't be shared. And a single person pays 25% less council tax than a couple - not half.

Many discounts involve pairing up - 2-for-1 cinema tickets, Two-Together railcards, couples gym memberships - plus solo travellers often pay a single person supplement.

This affects a lot of people. Some 18.5m people had never been married or in a civil partnership in 2024 – 36.8% of the population aged 16 and over, official figures show.

And overall 8.6m people were estimated to be living alone in the UK last year - that's nearly a third of all households.

Ahead of their house purchase, Sarah and Leanne agreed a minimum amount of time they'd live together for - two years, which they then extended to four - and discussed what would happen if one person wanted to leave.

Their mortgage payments were split proportionally to take into account their differing salaries, and the arrangements detailed in a declaration of trust so they would be protected when they came to sell.

They were able to split the household bills - with these coming out of a joint account and self-professed "bill keeper" Sarah keeping track of what they needed to transfer each month - but also cut costs by sharing some meals and the cooking as they had similar eating habits.

"We called it our happy home, not our forever home," says Leanne.

"And it was a very happy home," agrees Sarah.

Benefits to buying a home with friends include a bigger deposit and budget, and split costs, according to the Homeowner's Alliance. But it says people should consider potential pitfalls seriously and plan ahead by being upfront about their finances, seeking separate legal advice and drawing up a formal agreement.

Sarah and Leanne sold their house for a profit four years after moving in, and they put the equity they'd built up toward their next, separate purchases.

"Neither of us would have been able to do what we've done without having the property that we had together," says Sarah. "It's brought us a lot of freedom."

Leanne thinks she would have been able to afford what she wanted in time, but the financial benefits from buying with Sarah made this possible much sooner.

"The hidden singles tax is that everything has to take so much longer for you to be able to be in a position of affordability to do what you want to do," she adds.

Their success inspired their friend Philly to set up Cucoon - an online platform matching up singles to potentially buy together.

She says her aim is to "level the playing field", adding the singles tax is particularly high when it comes to housing.