Probate, in plain English: what executors actually do, step by step
30 July 2026 · Inherit Vault
Probate has a reputation as a dark art. It's actually a sequence, slow, form-heavy, but knowable. Here it is in plain English for England and Wales.
What probate is
The grant of probate is a court document proving the executor's authority to act on the estate. Banks, the Land Registry, and investment platforms demand it before releasing significant assets. If there's no will, the equivalent (letters of administration) goes to the next of kin, and the intestacy rules, not anyone's wishes, decide who inherits.
When you don't need it
Small estates often skip probate entirely: joint accounts and jointly-owned homes pass automatically to the survivor, and each bank has a threshold (commonly £5,000–£50,000) below which they'll pay out against just the death certificate. Many ordinary estates need no grant at all.
The sequence
First fortnight: register the death (within 5 days), use the government's Tell Us Once service, secure the property, find the will, and notify banks, accounts freeze, which stops direct debits, so check the home insurance especially.
First months: value everything. Every account balance at date of death, property valuations, pension and policy values, debts. This is the stage that takes weeks or months, and its speed depends almost entirely on whether the executor knows what exists, an unknown pension can't be valued.
Then: inheritance tax first, probate second. Any IHT due must be paid (or arranged) before the grant is issued, a famous chicken-and-egg, solved by the Direct Payment Scheme letting banks pay HMRC straight from the deceased's frozen accounts. The probate application itself is £300 (2026), done online in most cases, and currently takes several weeks to a few months to come back.
Finally: collect assets, pay debts, keep accounts, wait out any claims period, distribute, done. A simple estate wraps in 6–9 months; complexity, property sales, or a missing paper trail stretch it well past a year.
The pattern behind every slow probate
Talk to probate professionals and one theme dominates: delay comes from discovery, not bureaucracy. The forms are the forms. What stretches months into years is not knowing what the deceased had, and every asset discovered late reopens valuations and sometimes the tax.
That's fixable in advance, by you, now: keep one current, private map of everything you hold and who to contact, the thing Inherit Vault stores encrypted, checks you're alive against, and hands your executor when it matters, unlocked by the Recovery Certificate stored with your will. Give your executor a sequence, not a search.
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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