If you've searched this question, you already know why you're asking it. Mortgage interest relief for landlords was cut back years ago, stamp duty on an additional property now carries a 5% surcharge, and mortgage rates are nowhere near the lows of the 2010s. None of that is imagined. The honest answer isn't a flat yes or no though, it's that buy-to-let in the UK has gone from being reliably profitable almost anywhere to being genuinely profitable only in some places, which makes where you buy matter more than it used to, not less.
What's actually changed
Three things have made buy-to-let a different proposition than it was a decade ago. Mortgage interest used to be deductible against rental income before tax; since the Section 24 changes finished phasing in, landlords instead get a flat 20% tax credit on interest costs regardless of their actual tax rate, which is a real loss for higher-rate taxpayers specifically. Stamp duty on an additional property carries a 5% surcharge on top of standard rates, on the full price, not just the portion above the tax-free threshold. And mortgage rates, while they've come down from their peak, are still well above what landlords who bought in the 2010s were paying, which directly eats into monthly cashflow on an interest-only mortgage.
Taken together, these changes hit hardest in expensive areas with naturally low yields to begin with, since a bigger mortgage means bigger interest costs and a bigger stamp duty bill, on a property that was already only generating a modest return relative to its price.
Why location matters more than ever
The gap between a 2.5% yield and a 14.5% yield isn't noise, it's the difference between a property that barely covers its costs after the tax and rate changes above, and one that comfortably does even with them. A UK buy-to-let property in a low-yield area was already a marginal investment before 2020; the changes since then have mostly pushed it from marginal to negative. The same changes barely dent a genuinely high-yield property, because the rental income was never the tight part of the equation there.
This is really the core of answering "is buy-to-let still worth it": it depends enormously on which buy-to-let property you're talking about, far more than it depends on the general policy environment, which is the same for everyone.
The honest verdict
Buy-to-let as a blanket strategy, buy something in a nice-looking area and let the numbers sort themselves out, is a weaker idea than it was ten years ago. Buy-to-let as a deliberate search for areas where the numbers still work is not obviously weaker at all; the tax and rate changes just made it more important to actually check the yield before buying instead of assuming any reasonable property will do fine.
It's also not purely about yield. Leverage still works the same way it always has: a mortgage lets you control a property's full value and capital growth using a fraction of that as a deposit, at a borrowing rate that, even now, is often lower than the return the property itself generates in a genuinely good area. That's a real advantage buy-to-let has over most other ways to invest the same amount of money, and it hasn't gone anywhere.
Check the real numbers before deciding
Rather than a general answer, check where actually still works: the highest-yield postcodes right now, a list of the best areas under a budget you set, or run your own numbers on a specific property with the buy-to-let cashflow calculator, which includes the stamp duty surcharge and a realistic mortgage payment, not just the headline yield.
Figures are gross averages from live market listings as of publication, not a forecast or a valuation of any individual property. Not financial advice.