Stamp act
legislation that requires a tax for certain documents
A stamp act is any legislation that requires a tax to be paid on the transfer of certain documents. Those who pay the tax receive an official stamp on their documents, making them legal documents. A variety of products have been covered by stamp acts including playing cards, dice, patent medicines, cheques, mortgages, contracts, marriage licenses and newspapers. The items may have to be physically stamped at approved government offices following payment of the duty, although methods involving annual payment of a fixed sum or purchase of adhesive stamps are more practical and common.
This system of taxation was first devised in the Netherlands in 1624 after a public competition to find a new form of tax. Stamp acts have been enforced in many countries, including Australia, Canada, People's Republic of China, Ireland, India, Malaysia, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
The taxes raised under a stamp act are called stamp duty.
Australia
Stamps acts were enacted in various Australian states in 1878, 1882, 1886, 1890, and 1894, with amendments from 1892 to 1907. According to these acts, stamps were required on many types of business transactions: negotiable instruments, promissory notes, bills of lading, and receipts.
In Western Australia, duties of this type were overhauled in the Western Australian Stamp Act 1921, which took effect on 1 January 2010.
“Stamp act” enters the record as legislation that requires a tax for certain documents. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stamp, legislation and requires can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14565721. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1624, 1878, 1882 and 1886.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stamp act” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.