Where should you store your will? Options compared (England & Wales)
30 July 2026 · Inherit Vault
Around half of UK adults with wills store them at home. Every probate solicitor has a story about the will that was never found, and here's the uncomfortable legal reality: if the original will can't be located after death, the law may presume you destroyed it deliberately, and your estate can pass as if you'd never written one.
The options
At home: free and instant to access, and exposed to fire, flood, tidying, and the awkward fact that the people most affected by the will may be the ones who find it first. If you must, use a fireproof safe and make sure your executor knows the combination exists somewhere they can get it.
With your solicitor: the classic answer, usually free or nearly so (firms store wills because it brings them the probate work). Professionally indexed, insured, and handed only to executors with a death certificate. The risk is continuity, firms merge and close, though the SRA tracks where closed firms' wills go.
HM Courts & Tribunals Probate Service: the official government storage for England and Wales, £20 one-off. Extremely safe, rarely used, and retrieval is by post with the death certificate, slower, but bombproof.
The National Will Register (Certainty): not storage, but registration, it records THAT a will exists and where, and executors and solicitors routinely search it. Registering costs about £30 and solves the "did they even have a will?" problem, whichever storage you choose.
The strongest setup is boring: original with a solicitor or the Probate Service, registered with the National Will Register, and your executor told all three facts, that a will exists, who holds it, and that they're named in it.
What belongs in the same packet
The will says who gets what. It deliberately shouldn't catalogue every account and asset, it becomes a public document after probate, and it goes stale. So alongside the will (not inside it), the same packet should hold the practical papers your executor needs on day one: funeral wishes, a note of where the estate map lives, and, if you use Inherit Vault, your printed Recovery Certificate. That certificate is the physical key that lets your executor unlock your encrypted vault: the full, current map of accounts, pensions, policies and digital assets that a public, static will could never safely carry. Solicitors will happily hold one more sealed page in the packet they already keep.
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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