How much does it cost to make a will?

What a will costs, and why there is no official price

Making a will in the UK costs between nothing and a few thousand pounds, and the number depends almost entirely on who does the drafting rather than on what you own. As a working guide: a DIY template runs about £10 to £30, an online will-writing service typically £50 to £150 for a single will, and a solicitor-drafted simple will commonly £300 to £1,000 or more, with trust-based and cross-border wills sitting above that. Couples making mirror wills usually pay less than twice the single-will price.

Those are observed market bands, not rates anyone is bound by. The document itself attracts no court fee, no registration fee and no statutory charge of any kind, which is worth stating plainly because it explains everything else about how this market prices. What you are buying is drafting skill, advice and, sometimes, a professional indemnity policy standing behind the words. You are not buying legal validity, which is free. This guide covers England and Wales, with a note on Scotland below, and it is general information rather than legal advice on your own circumstances.

GOV.UK's guidance on making a will puts it directly: you can write your will yourself, but you should get advice if your will is not straightforward. That single sentence is the whole decision, and the rest of this page is about working out which side of it you are on.

The four routes and their typical cost

Route	Typical cost	What you get	Suited to
DIY template or stationery kit	£10 to £30	A blank structure you complete yourself, with no review	Very simple estates, or a stopgap while you arrange something better
Online will-writing service	£50 to £150 single, more for mirror wills	Guided questions, a generated document, sometimes a light human check	Straightforward estates that fit the standard shapes the software expects
Solicitor, simple will	£300 to £1,000 or more; mirror wills below double the single fee	An interview, tailored drafting, file notes on capacity, advice on what you had not thought to ask	Anyone with a complicating factor, or who wants the advice as much as the document
Solicitor, trust or complex will	Above the simple-will band, quoted case by case	Trust drafting, tax structuring, coordination with foreign wills	Blended families, business or agricultural assets, overseas property, deliberate exclusions

Regional variation is genuine: London and the South East sit at the top of each band, and a market-town firm will often quote a fraction of a City rate for identical drafting. Because the work is done largely by appointment, email and post, many people instruct a well-reviewed firm outside the most expensive areas. Our guide to finding a solicitor or will writer near you explains how the different providers are regulated and what to ask before instructing one, and if you are weighing the online route specifically, making a will online or for free covers what those services do and do not include.

Why the quotes vary so much

Two things explain the spread, and neither is widely understood.

First, will-writing is not a reserved legal activity. The Legal Services Act 2007 reserves a short list of activities to authorised persons, including the conduct of litigation, rights of audience and probate activities. Drafting a will is not on that list. Anyone can therefore offer will-writing: solicitors regulated by the SRA, will writers who belong to a voluntary self-regulating body, and will writers who answer to nobody at all. All three compete on the same search results page, and the price gap between them is partly a gap in regulation, insurance and recourse if something goes wrong. Note the asymmetry: the will is unreserved, but applying for probate afterwards is reserved, which is why the firm that drafts a will cheaply may still charge properly to administer the estate.

Second, nobody has to publish a price. The SRA transparency rules that make solicitors publish indicative costs cover probate work, not will drafting, so there is no equivalent price list to shop against. You have to ask, in writing, for a single figure covering everything you want.

The add-ons that are not in the headline fee

A £99 online will and a £600 solicitor's will are frequently not the same purchase. The items below are commonly quoted separately, and one or two of them can close most of the gap:

• Storage of the original. Probate normally needs the original document, not a copy. Some firms store free, some charge annually, and you can instead deposit a will with HM Courts and Tribunals Service for a one-off charge of £24. Our guide to storing a will and the National Will Register covers the options, including registering where the will is kept so your executors can find it.
• Reviews and updates. Free rewrites for a fixed period, or an annual subscription covering unlimited changes. Useful if your circumstances are genuinely in motion, dead money if they are not.
• Severing a joint tenancy. If you own your home as joint tenants, your share passes automatically to the co-owner and your will cannot touch it. Converting to a tenancy in common is a separate piece of work, and it is the step most often missed when a couple want to protect a share for children from an earlier relationship.
• Trust drafting. Any trust inside the will (life interest, discretionary, disabled person's) moves the job out of the simple-will band and needs the tax consequences thought through alongside it.
• Lasting powers of attorney. Frequently sold as a bundle with a will, and often the largest single add-on. Registration alone costs £92 per LPA, or £184 for both types, payable to the Office of the Public Guardian on top of any drafting fee, with reductions available on low income and exemptions on certain benefits. Our guide to registering an LPA sets out the process.

When you ask for an all-in figure, name these items specifically. A quote that excludes four of them is not cheaper, it is narrower.

The genuinely free routes

Several schemes have a qualified professional draft a simple will at no cost to you:

• Free Wills Month offers people aged 55 and over a free simple will through participating solicitors, running in set months each year (the next campaign opens on 1 October 2026). For couples making mirror wills, only one of you needs to have reached 55. The scheme is explicit that you are under no obligation to leave a gift to any of the participating charities, though they hope you will.
• Will Aid runs each November. Participating solicitors waive their fee and invite a voluntary donation to the scheme's partner charities instead. The suggested donation is set each year, so check the current figure on the scheme's own site rather than relying on an older article.
• Individual charities, including several large health and hospice charities, fund free will services year-round through partner solicitors or online providers, again with no obligation to leave a legacy.
• Employee benefits, unions and packaged bank accounts. Free or discounted will-writing turns up surprisingly often in benefits packages people never read. Check before you pay separately.

One constraint applies to all of them: the free offer covers a simple will, and the solicitor decides what counts as simple. If your circumstances need a trust or cross-border drafting, expect the complex element to be quoted as paid work. That is not a bait and switch, it is the scope of the scheme.

When paying more is the right call

Price should follow complexity, not anxiety. For a single person or a first marriage, with UK assets only and everything passing outright to a spouse and then children, an online service or a charity scheme is a perfectly sound choice. A professional fee starts earning its keep when any one of these applies:

• A trust in the will. Typically to give a surviving partner a home for life while preserving the capital for children from an earlier relationship. This is the single most common reason a will stops being simple.
• A business, farm or agricultural property. Succession, control and the interaction with business and agricultural relief all need drafting that a template cannot supply, and the relief regime changed from April 2026.
• Overseas assets. Foreign succession law may override your UK will, or a foreign will may accidentally revoke it. Getting two documents to coexist is specialist work.
• Blended families and unmarried partners. The default rules treat cohabitants as strangers and give a new spouse the power to redirect everything. See blended families and unmarried partners.
• Leaving someone out who might expect to inherit, particularly a financially dependent adult child or a long-term partner. Excluding someone safely takes deliberate drafting and a documented reason, because the estate can face a claim.
• Any question over capacity. Where a will is made in later life or after a dementia diagnosis, a solicitor's contemporaneous file notes are the evidence that defends it. Our guide to mental capacity, dementia and will validity explains how challenges of this kind run.
• An estate near the inheritance tax thresholds, where the will's structure interacts with the residence nil-rate band and other allowances. Start with our inheritance tax pillar guide.

The expensive mistake is almost never overpaying for a simple will. It is forcing a complicated situation through a cheap template because the price was attractive, then leaving the family to litigate the ambiguity at a cost measured in tens of thousands.

The cost of not making one at all

The comparison that matters is not £30 against £600, it is either of those against the intestacy rules. Die without a valid will and your estate is distributed in a fixed statutory order: a spouse or civil partner takes the largest share, children come next, and unmarried partners, stepchildren who were never adopted, friends and charities receive nothing, however long the relationship. Our guide to who inherits if there is no will sets out the order, and the practical consequences (delay, a bond in some cases, no choice of who administers the estate) land on the people you leave behind.

Either way, your estate faces a second bill after your death that has nothing to do with what you paid for the will: the probate application fee of £526 where the estate is worth over £5,000, and no fee at £5,000 or less, plus sealed copies of the grant at £2 each when ordered with the application, and any professional administration costs. Our guide to how much probate costs itemises that side of the ledger, and the probate cost calculator puts a number on it.

Validity is free, so do not pay for it twice

Whatever you spend, the will only works if it is executed correctly. GOV.UK sets out the conditions: you must be 18 or over, of sound mind, and making the will voluntarily; the will must be in writing; you must sign it in the presence of two witnesses who are both over 18; and those witnesses must then sign in your presence. Neither witness, nor their married partner, can be left anything in the will. The will stays valid if they are, but their gift fails, which is a quiet way to disinherit the very person you meant to provide for. The full detail is in signing and witnessing rules.

Nor is a will a one-off purchase. GOV.UK recommends reviewing it every 5 years and after any major life change, and marriage or civil partnership cancels any will made before it. Budget for a review, not just a draft.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The figures and rules above are for England and Wales. Scotland has its own law of succession: the minimum age for making a will is 12, the witnessing requirements differ, and legal rights give a spouse and children a fixed claim on the moveable estate that a will cannot defeat, which changes what drafting can achieve and therefore what it is worth paying for. Northern Ireland has its own probate and succession framework. If you are domiciled in either, take advice locally rather than applying the England and Wales position by analogy.

Working out which route you need

The cheapest sensible approach is to settle the decisions before you buy anything: who your executors are, who raises your children, which specific gifts you want to make, and who takes the residue. Our making a will checklist walks through those in order, and doing it first keeps any paid appointment short, which keeps a fixed fee fixed. For the full walkthrough of the process itself, see how to make a will in the UK, and couples signing matching documents should understand the difference between mirror wills and mutual wills before they do.

If any of the complexity triggers above apply to you, a short scoping conversation is usually enough to tell you whether you are in the £100 bracket or the £900 one. We can put you in touch with an estate planning specialist who will quote transparently for exactly what your situation needs, with no obligation, and for many people the honest answer is that a straightforward will is all that is required. Our wills pillar guide collects the rest of the reading.