A recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by Finder has found that more than 2 million people are still stuck in the discontinued Help To Buy (H2B) scheme, with savings worth £4.859 billion in total.
A Help to Buy ISA is a type of savings account introduced to help first-time buyers purchase their first home. You can pay £200 a month into the ISA and the government, will top up your savings by 25%.
For example, if you’d saved the maximum of £12,000 over 5 years, and used this to purchase your first home, the government would add an extra £3,000 on top to give you a total of £15,000. There is a purchase price limit of £250,000 (or up to £450,000 in London).
There are a series of issues with the Help to Buy ISA that Finder believes need to be addressed:
Despite the average UK house price rising 42% in the 9 years since it launched, the Help to Buy ISA price cap has never changed.
According to analysis of recent figures by Finder, over half (54%) of local authorities in the UK had average house prices above the £250,000 H2B ISA limit as of December 2024.
The scheme is also being discontinued by the government – it is no longer possible to open a H2B ISA, and you won’t be able to pay into it after 2029. It will then be scrapped completely in November 2030, so millions will lose the promised government bonus if they can’t use it by this date.
The Lifetime ISA (LISA) was effectively brought in to replace the H2B ISA and it helps resolve the property value issue with a house price limit of £450,000 across the UK. You can also pay up to £4,000 a year into it per year vs the £2,400 a year with a H2B ISA, and both come with a 25% government bonus if you purchase your first home at a price below the cap.
You can’t combine a LISA and H2B ISA, meaning that someone wanting to take advantage of the LISA’s superior benefits would need to transfer their capital across. However, you aren’t allowed to move it all across into a LISA at once. It is only possible to transfer up to £4,000 per year across.
The main issue with trying to move from a Help to Buy ISA to a Lifetime ISA is that you are limited in the amount you can move in one go. Finder believes this could be resolved by a more flexible approach to combining Help to Buy ISA and Lifetime ISA savings, which does not penalise those who have already spent years saving into a Help to Buy ISA.
Finder has been campaigning for H2B ISA holders to be able to transfer all their savings across into a LISA in one go, including writing letters to MPs, but has yet to receive any comment on how this will be addressed. The government also launched an enquiry into the Lifetime ISA recently, but it made no mention of the Help To Buy ISA.
Finder has created a template email that you can use to write to your local MP and demand change for first-time buyers.
Download the letter for free here to copy it and use it in an email.
Matt Mckenna
UK Head of Communications
T: +44 20 8191 8806
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