Stamp Duty

Taxes on purchases! Taxes on real estate! Taxes on tobacco! Tea! What else can we tax? Oh yeah, documents. Yep. Documents.

Stamp duty is a tax levied on legal documents...all kinds. Checks, licenses, land transactions...you name the document, it can probably be taxed via stamp duty.

Stamp duty goes all the way back to the 1600s, from Prussia and England to Spain and the Netherlands. It wasn't as common as it used to be, but it's still around. In the U.S., some states still have stamp duties for things like mortgages and deeds.

Documents used to be stamped to show that the tax had been paid on the document. Modern-day stamp duty doesn’t require actual stamps, because, well...technology.