What £850,000 means for your stamp duty bill
At £850,000 you are above the £500,000 first-time buyer ceiling, so relief is not available regardless of whether you have owned property before. The whole purchase is assessed at standard rates, giving £32,500 — an effective rate of 3.8%.
Everything between £250,001 and £925,000 is taxed at 5%, so within this stretch the marginal cost is predictable: every extra £10,000 on the price adds £500 to your bill. That makes the trade-off easy to weigh when you are negotiating.
For context, £850,000 is about 193% above the UK average house price of roughly £290,000. Your marginal rate at this price is 5%, meaning that is the rate charged on the next pound you add to the purchase price.