Ed Sheeran, 34, has created his own mini village in Suffolk as on his private £3.75 million estate there's even a recording studio and a pub! But his slice of pride and joy in the countryside is about to cost him even more money – and that's thanks to the government.
In parliament on Wednesday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves set out her budget and it included a tax on high-value homes. Owners of properties valued at over £2 million by the Valuation Office (in 2026 prices) will be liable for a recurring annual charge which will be additional to existing council tax liability. This major change won't come into place until April 2028.
What is the so-called 'mansion tax' in the new budget?
There will be four price bands within the tax. The lowest band of £2 million for example, will have a £2,500 fee, whereas owners can expect to pay up to £7,500 for a £5 million pad. This is good and bad news for Ed, whose estate comes in at £3.75 million so he would be in the middle of the charge bracket. As house prices rise and Ed has acquired more properties within his estate he might actually face multiple tax bills if more than one house is now valued over £2 million.
David Little, Partner in Financial Planning at wealth management firm Evelyn Partners, has said: "There could be widespread implications for the property market in the South East of England, where transactions could surge before the surcharge kicks in and sellers try to price properties below the threshold.
"There will no doubt be a host of objections from property owners, not just around the £2 million mark but across those three bands," warns David, and he cites a time in history when a property tax caused uproar. "To see this, you only have to look at the story of the 'window tax'. For over 150 years, until the mid-19th-century, an effort to levy a wealth tax involved judging the value properties according to the number of windows they had, so this led to many landlords and wealthy people bricking up windows to bring their property below the window tax threshold."
Did you know this movement led to the term "daylight robbery"? Many covered-up windows are still visible across London today.
Ed Sheeran's Suffolk estate
Ed has created an idyllic life in Suffolk along with his wife Cherry Seaborn and their daughters, Lyra Antarctica and Jupiter. The 'Bad Habits' singer has snapped up several houses on the Suffolk site over a number of years to create an estate of his own. It also includes a lake, a treehouse, an underground music room, a chapel and even a pub. It has been dubbed "Sheeran-ville" and we can see why. While Ed isn't a prolific Instagram poster, he does occasionally share glimpses of his private home life online. In my five years at HELLO!, I've witnessed glimpses at the stunning grounds as well as the recording studio, but one thing is for sure, the star likes to keep an air of mystery about his residence.