Executor duties checklist: every task, stage by stage

If you have been named as an executor in England and Wales, your job is to register the death, secure and value everything the person owned, apply for a grant of probate where one is needed (the fee is £526 for estates over £5,000), pay any inheritance tax and other debts, and then distribute what is left to the beneficiaries named in the will, keeping accounts as you go. For a straightforward estate the whole job typically takes around 9 to 12 months.

This page turns that job into a single stage-gated checklist you can print and work through. Each stage lists the tasks in the order they normally happen, with the deadlines and figures that apply in 2026. Because the checklist is chronological, it pairs naturally with our free probate timeline estimator: answer a few questions about the estate and it maps these same stages onto a realistic timetable for your situation. This article covers what to do and when; for the legal background to the role itself, see our companion guide to executor duties and responsibilities.

How to use this checklist

The checklist is split into six stages. Within a stage the tasks can overlap, but you should not move to the next stage until the current one is substantially done: you cannot value the estate before you know what is in it, you cannot apply for probate before dealing with inheritance tax, and you must not distribute before debts are settled. That stage-gating is not bureaucracy. It is what protects you, because executors are personally liable for getting the order wrong.

Everything below describes England and Wales. Scotland runs a parallel system (confirmation rather than probate) and the differences are flagged where they bite. If the person died without a valid will you are an administrator rather than an executor, but the practical task list is almost identical once your authority is sorted.

Stage 1: the first week (register the death and secure the estate)

• Register the death within 5 days at a register office (8 days in Scotland). Take the medical certificate of cause of death. See gov.uk: what to do after a death.
• Order certified copies of the death certificate. Get several. Banks, insurers and pension providers each want their own copy, and ordering later is slower.
• Locate the original will and any codicils. Check the house, the solicitor who drafted it, and the national will register. Confirm you are named as executor and note any funeral wishes.
• Arrange the funeral. Funeral costs are payable from the estate ahead of almost everything else, and most banks will pay an undertaker's invoice directly from the deceased's account even before probate.
• Secure the estate. Lock the property, take in post, remove obvious valuables to safekeeping, secure any vehicle. Tell the home insurer the property is unoccupied; most policies restrict or lapse cover on empty homes, and an uninsured loss is exactly the kind of thing executors get held liable for.
• Use Tell Us Once. The registrar gives you a reference for the Tell Us Once service, which notifies HMRC, DWP, DVLA, the Passport Office and the local council in one step.

These first days are also the hardest ones emotionally, and the checklist is deliberately short. If you want a fuller walk through this period, our guide to the first 30 days for executors covers it in depth so this page does not have to.

Stage 2: weeks 2 to 4 (notify organisations and freeze accounts)

• Write to every bank and building society with a certified death certificate. Accounts in the sole name of the deceased are frozen; direct debits stop, so check nothing essential (home insurance, mortgage) lapses unnoticed.
• Notify private and workplace pension providers, life insurers, investment platforms and any employer.
• Notify utility companies, the mortgage lender or landlord, and subscription services. Redirect post if the property will stand empty.
• Ask each institution for a date-of-death balance or valuation. You will need these figures for Stage 3, so request them in the notification letter rather than writing twice.
• Consider a will search and an unknown-asset search if the paperwork is thin. A lost savings account found after distribution is a genuine headache.

Stage 3: months 1 to 2 (value the estate and check whether probate is needed)

• List every asset and its date-of-death value: property (get an open-market valuation, ideally from a RICS surveyor for anything near the tax threshold), bank balances, investments, pensions, vehicles, and personal possessions.
• List every debt: mortgage, loans, credit cards, utilities owed, and the funeral account.
• Identify jointly owned assets. Property and accounts held as joint tenants pass automatically to the survivor and sit outside the grant, though their value can still matter for inheritance tax.
• Check whether you need a grant at all. Small cash estates and estates passing wholly by survivorship often do not. Our free do I need probate checker gives you an answer in a couple of minutes, and our guide to whether you need probate explains the thresholds banks apply.
• Check the inheritance tax position. The nil-rate band is £325,000 (frozen until 5 April 2031), with a residence nil-rate band of up to £175,000 where a home passes to direct descendants, tapered £1 for every £2 above £2,000,000. Tax is 40% above the available thresholds, reduced to 36% where 10% or more of the net estate goes to charity. Our guide to the inheritance tax threshold works through the details.

Stage 4: months 2 to 3 (inheritance tax and the probate application)

• Work out whether the estate is excepted or needs a full IHT400 account. Most estates with no tax to pay are excepted and report values within the probate application itself; taxable and complex estates file the IHT400 with HMRC first. See gov.uk: valuing the estate.
• Pay any inheritance tax due. The deadline is the end of the sixth month after the month of death, after which interest runs. Tax on property can be paid in instalments; tax on most other assets is due before HMRC issues the reference the probate application needs.
• Apply for the grant of probate, online where possible. The court fee, set at £526 on 13 July 2026, applies to estates over £5,000; smaller estates pay nothing. Order sealed copies at £2 each with the application, one per institution holding assets.
• Wait for the grant. In the most recent HMCTS quarter (January to March 2026), digital applications averaged 4.5 weeks and paper ones 16.5, with an overall mean of 6.4 weeks; your own wait may differ. Our probate timeline guide covers what drives the wait and what can stall an application.

Stage 5: months 3 to 6 (collect assets and settle debts)

• Open an executor's bank account for estate money. Never mix estate funds with your own; clean accounts are your best protection if anyone later questions the administration.
• Send sealed copies of the grant to each bank, insurer and platform and collect in the balances and proceeds.
• Sell or transfer property and shares as the will and beneficiaries require. Property sales are the single most common reason estates run past a year.
• Place a section 27 Trustee Act 1925 notice in The Gazette (and a local paper where there is property) and wait two months before distributing. This is the step most DIY executors skip and the one that matters most: it protects you from personal liability to creditors you did not know about. See Trustee Act 1925, section 27.
• Pay all known debts in the correct order: funeral costs, administration expenses, secured debts, then unsecured creditors, before any beneficiary receives a penny.
• Finalise the deceased's income tax to the date of death, and the estate's own tax on any income or gains during the administration.

Stage 6: months 6 to 12 (distribute and account)

• Prepare estate accounts showing everything received, everything paid out and the balance for distribution. All residuary beneficiaries should approve them.
• Consider timing. Some executors wait until claims windows against the estate have closed before distributing; conversely, beneficiaries generally cannot demand payment within the executor's year. Distributing early to keep people happy is how executors end up personally out of pocket.
• Pay legacies first, then distribute the residue, getting a signed receipt from each beneficiary.
• Keep the file. Retain the grant and the estate accounts indefinitely, and the full paperwork for at least 12 years.

Protecting yourself: the liability short list

Scattered through the stages above are the tasks that exist purely to protect you rather than to move the estate along. Pulled into one place, they are:

1. Insure the empty property from day one, on an unoccupied-property basis.
2. Do not distribute anything until the section 27 Gazette notice has run its two months.
3. Do not distribute until all debts and taxes are settled, in the statutory order.
4. Keep estate money in a separate account and keep accounts beneficiaries can inspect.
5. If the estate is taxable, insolvent, contested, or includes a business or foreign assets, take professional advice before acting. The cost comes from the estate, not from you, and our guide to whether you need a solicitor for probate helps you judge which parts to hand over.

This checklist is general information for a typical estate in England and Wales, not legal advice for yours.

Put your own dates on this checklist

A checklist tells you the order; it cannot tell you the dates, because those depend on whether there is a property to sell, whether a full inheritance tax account is needed and how you apply. Our free probate timeline estimator takes the stages on this page and turns them into a personalised start-to-finish timetable, built on the official HMCTS wait-time statistics, in about two minutes.

And if working through the list has shown you that this estate is more than you want to handle alone, that is a normal conclusion, not a failure. We can introduce you to a vetted probate specialist who can take on some or all of the stages above; you stay in control of what you keep and what you hand over. Start at our hub for executors.