Capital gains tax - how much?

[Postdog]

I have a house to sell, which at the moment is my main residence and not subject to capital gains tax. I'm considering putting it on a "buy to let" mortgage, and letting it out, but at the end of the mortgage, it still won't be mine and I will have to sell it anyway then if not before. As the sale of that will be subject to capital gains tax, can anyone tell me how much that will be. The current mortgage is �75,000, and the current value is �225,000.

[buildersmate]

You only pay the capital gain on the escalation in value when you sell after it ceases to become your main residence. So it depends how much its value goes up by in the future - I'm not a fortune-teller. The value of your mortgage is irrelevant to the calculation. And you can probably get taper relief on some of the capital gain to boot (someone like Dzug is bound to know).

[kags]

The calculation when you eventually sell the house will be done on a time apportionment basis - so if for example you own the house in total for 20 years, and you let it out for 8 years, 8/20 of the sale proceeds after expenses less the original cost will be chargeable to tax. However, you can always claim the last 36 months of ownership as exempt, so in this example the gain would drop to 5/20. In addition, there is something called lettings relief, which allows for further exemption of the lower of �40000 or the proportion of the gain relating to the time you lived there. This is a very valuable relief. In addition, as mentioned above, there will be taper relief based on the time you own the house before you sell it - this could be as much as 40% of any remaining gain after the above reliefs. Finally, you have an annual exemption (curently �8800). The cost of any capital improvements to the property Inot maintenance) will also be allowabe. You need to remember though that any of these reliefs and exemptions could change in future budgets.

[Postdog]

Ta for the answers.