How much does it cost to sort out someone's estate? (UK, 2026)
1 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
The probate application fee itself is modest, £300 in 2026 for estates over the reporting threshold, free below it. That number gives a misleading impression of what "sorting out an estate" actually costs.
Doing it yourself
An executor handling everything personally mostly pays in time, not money: weeks or months of evenings and annual leave, plus incidental costs, copies of the death certificate (each institution wants its own), courier fees, property valuations if needed. For a simple, well-documented estate, total cash cost can be a few hundred pounds.
Paying a solicitor
Solicitors typically charge either a fixed fee, often somewhere in the £1,500–£3,000 range for a straightforward estate, or a percentage of the estate's value, commonly around 1–5%, which on a £400,000 estate is several thousand pounds either way. Complexity (property, business assets, disputes, assets abroad) pushes this up sharply.
The hidden cost: time itself
Every month an estate stays unresolved is a month a house sits empty and uninsured for standard cover, a month of subscriptions still billing a dead person's card, a month a beneficiary waits for money they may urgently need. None of that shows up on an invoice, but it's real cost, and it's driven far more by how findable the assets were than by the estate's size.
What actually inflates the bill
Solicitors bill by the hour for the parts that take longest, and the parts that take longest are almost always investigation: tracing unknown accounts, chasing providers for statements, untangling which of several old pensions still exist. A one-page list of accounts, providers, and policy numbers can turn a week of billable tracing into an afternoon.
The cheapest thing anyone can do for their own estate isn't a discount code or a fee comparison, it's leaving the list that turns your executor from an investigator back into an administrator. That's the entire job Inherit Vault does: one encrypted map, released when it's needed, so nobody's paying a solicitor's hourly rate to do detective work.
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is the UK's digital inheritance vault: every account, policy, and instruction your family will need, encrypted so only you can read it, released to your executor when it genuinely matters.
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