A stampede to complete property purchases before the 31 March stamp duty cliff-edge has caused a shortage of removals services, with more than 75,000 buyers forecast to miss the deadline and pay thousands of pounds more.

The property website Rightmove is calling for a short extension to the stamp duty deadline by the government.

About 74,000 movers in England are predicted to just miss it, according to Rightmove, leaving them on the hook for £142m in additional stamp duty.

The changes, which were confirmed in the autumn budget, are likely to affect several thousand buyers in Northern Ireland where roughly 2,000 homes change hands each month. Scotland and Wales have different property taxes and are not affected.

“It’s madness in terms of everybody who is trying to move in the last week of March,” said Richard Dolan, the managing director of Greens Removals in East Anglia.

“When you make an announcement like this, you’re creating pandemonium in the system,” he said. “We are only dealing with clients who have got a completion date. There is a huge number of people that ring us every day and ask usif we have any space.”

From 1 April, significant changes to stamp duty land tax will affect first-time buyers and home movers. The biggest is the reduction of the nil-rate threshold from £250,000 to £125,000. This means that buyers will now pay a 2% tax on the part of the property value between £125,001 and £250,000.

For first-time buyers, the tax-free threshold is being cut from £425,000 to £300,000, plus the maximum property value eligible for relief will drop from £625,000 to £500,000.

While the current regime stands until 31 March, most banks are guaranteeing to process mortgage completions in time only if key paperwork is submitted by 25 March. Lloyds Banking Group, the country’s largest mortgage lender, and Barclays are among the big names to have asked conveyancers to request mortgage funds no later than this date.

“We are expecting a rush of customers trying to complete their purchase and avoid the extra cost,” said Amanda Bryden, the head of Halifax Intermediaries & Scottish Widows Bank at Lloyds. “We’ll do everything we can to get completions turned around before the stamp duty deadline if they come to us after 25 March, but there’s no guarantee.”

Those in the removals industry say the picture is more chaotic than when Covid related stamp duty changes were unwound more gradually in 2021.

With 43 years’ experience in the industry, David Strank, who runs Kent-based Stranks Removals & Storage, described the situation as “worse than I’ve ever known it”. “There’s not enough removal companies in the land to move the people that are moving next week.”

Strank suggested the deadline had not been publicised enough and had “crept up on people”. With the pressure on, removers were picking up boxes early and putting them in temporary storage.

Movers are doing whatever it takes to keep their sale, Strank said. To avoid having to pay an extra £6,500, one first-time buyer had agreed to complete by 31 March but let the vendor stay on until 2 April when they have secured movers.

“One elderly woman has decided to reduce her property to cover everyone else’s stamp duty,” said Strank. “She’s too frail. She can’t cope with the stress. It’s going to cost her about £10,000.”

Sarah Dwight, who runs her own eponymous practice and is a member of the Law Society’s conveyancing and land law committee, said property lawyers and conveyancers were working gruelling hours to ensure transactions made the cut-off date but did not have “magic wands”.

“We are all working flat out,” she said. “I was working on the weekend, emailing documents and letters to other solicitors and they were responding immediately.”

Dwight said that because the deadline has bigger implications for first-time buyers it was pushing pressure up the chain. “Normally first-time buyers aren’t overly pushy, because it’s their first home and they are excited. But some are going to lose far more than £2,500 and they’ve usually been waiting the longest for a chain to fall into place.

“I’ve had an email from a client that says: ‘If we miss next week, then we can’t move at all, and it will be your fault.’”

She said the Legal Ombudsman was expecting a rise in complaints given the projected number of home moves at risk of missing the deadline. “If a client cannot complete, it is not necessarily the conveyancer’s fault. These particular clients are in a chain with six or seven others, so it’s about making sure not only your own client can move, but everybody can move,” she added.

A Treasury spokesperson said: “We’re committed to making home ownership possible for hardworking Britons – that’s why we’re fixing the planning system and building 1.5m more homes.

“Thanks to measures taken at the budget, there will also be an additional 130,000 transactions over the next five years by first-time buyers and others buying a primary residence.”