Grant of probate vs letters of administration: which one do you need?

Three questions that settle it

You can work out which grant you need in under a minute. Ask, in order:

1. Is there a valid will? If no, you need letters of administration. Stop here.
2. Does the will name an executor? If no, you need letters of administration with will annexed.
3. Is a named executor willing and able to act? If yes, that executor applies for a grant of probate. If every named executor has died, lost capacity or renounced, you are back to letters of administration with will annexed.

That is the whole decision. Everything else in this guide is the detail behind each branch: who exactly can apply, how the estate is distributed differently, and what the application involves once you know your route. Before any of that, it is worth checking whether you need a grant at all, because plenty of estates do not. Our do I need probate checker runs through the asset types in a couple of minutes, and our guide to whether you need probate covers the detail. What follows is general information about the process in England and Wales, not legal advice for your specific situation.

What each grant actually is

Both documents are "grants of representation", court-sealed proof that a named person has legal authority to administer a deceased person's estate. In practice they do the same job: banks release funds against them, HM Land Registry transfers property against them, and share registrars sell holdings against them.

A grant of probate is issued to one or more executors named in a valid will. The executor's authority technically comes from the will itself and dates from death; the grant confirms it. According to GOV.UK's guidance on applying for probate, only certain people can apply, and where there is a will it is the named executors. Up to four can apply together.

Letters of administration are issued where there is no valid will. The applicant, called an administrator rather than an executor, is the closest living relative entitled under the intestacy rules, in a fixed order: spouse or civil partner first, then children, then parents, siblings and so on outwards. Unlike an executor, an administrator has no authority until the grant is issued, which matters if urgent steps are needed early on. An unmarried partner has no entitlement to apply or to inherit under these rules, however long the relationship lasted.

The middle case most guides skip: will annexed

There is a third route that catches families out precisely because it sits between the two clean cases. A will exists and is perfectly valid, but nobody named in it can act as executor. This happens more often than you might expect:

• The sole executor died before the person who made the will, and the will named no substitute.
• The named executor has lost mental capacity.
• The executor renounces the role before doing anything in the estate, perhaps due to age, distance or family friction.
• The will, often a homemade one, simply never appointed an executor at all.

The estate does not fall into intestacy. Instead, the probate registry issues letters of administration with will annexed. The applicant is usually the person with the largest beneficial interest under the will, and although their title is administrator, their instructions are the will's terms, not the intestacy order. Consider Priya and her brother Dev, whose father's will left everything equally between them but named only their late uncle as executor. Neither is an executor, so neither can apply for probate. Priya, as a residuary beneficiary, applies for letters of administration with will annexed, and once the grant arrives she distributes the £340,000 estate exactly as the will says: half to her, half to Dev.

Distribution: the real difference between the routes

Institutions treat the grants identically, but what you must do with the assets afterwards differs completely. Probate (and administration with will annexed) follows the will. Plain letters of administration follow the intestacy rules, which are rigid. Where the person left a spouse or civil partner and children, HMRC's Inheritance Tax Manual at IHTM12122 confirms the spouse takes the personal possessions, a statutory legacy of £322,000 (for deaths on or after 26 July 2023) and half of whatever remains; the children share the other half.

Worked through, suppose Martin dies without a will leaving his wife Carol and two adult children, with a sole-name estate of £500,000. Carol receives the personal possessions, the first £322,000, and half of the remaining £178,000, which is £89,000, giving her £411,000. The children share the other £89,000, taking £44,500 each. Had Martin written a will leaving everything to Carol, she would have received the full £500,000 and, because of the spouse exemption, the estate position for inheritance tax would have been simpler too. You can check any family shape against the rules with GOV.UK's intestacy tool, and our guide to who inherits when there is no will walks the full order of entitlement.

Side by side

	Grant of probate	Letters of administration
When it applies	Valid will with a willing, able executor	No valid will (or will annexed, where no executor can act)
Who applies	Executor(s) named in the will, up to four	Closest entitled relative under the intestacy rules
Authority begins	From death (grant confirms it)	Only once the grant is issued
Application form	PA1P or online	PA1A or online (PA1P if there is a will annexed)
Distribution follows	The will's terms	The intestacy order (or the will, if annexed)
Application fee	£526 (estate over £5,000)	£526 (estate over £5,000)

What happens next: forms, fee, timeline

Once you know your route, the practical steps line up behind it. Executors with a will apply on form PA1P; administrators with no will apply on form PA1A. GOV.UK's application guidance recommends applying online where you can, because paper applications take longer to process, and states that most grants arrive within 12 weeks of submission. The published statistics show the two routes are not equally quick. In January to March 2026, grants of probate took a mean of 5.0 weeks from submission to grant (median 1.3 weeks), while letters of administration took a mean of 10.5 weeks (median 11.0 weeks). Most of that gap is the application channel rather than the PA1A itself: 92.6% of probate applications were made digitally against only 45.3% of letters of administration applications, and paper is the slow route either way. A digital PA1A averaged 5.1 weeks. On top of the court wait, intestate estates take longer to reach the point of applying at all, because confirming entitlement and tracing relatives adds work first. Our guide to how long probate takes breaks down the full timeline.

The fee is identical for both grants. Per GOV.UK's probate fees page, the application costs £526 where the estate is worth more than £5,000, and nothing where it is £5,000 or less. Extra sealed copies cost £2 each when ordered with the application, so count the banks, registrars and other institutions you will need to write to and order enough up front: copies requested after you have submitted cost £16 each. Whichever form you use, you will first need to value the estate and establish whether inheritance tax is due, which our IHT400 and excepted estates walkthrough explains, and the wider journey from death certificate to final distribution is mapped in our probate pillar guide.

One further wrinkle on the administration side: where any beneficiary is under 18, or a life interest arises under the intestacy rules, the registry will usually require at least two administrators, because a minor cannot give a valid receipt for their share. A sole executor under a will faces no such requirement.

Where a specialist earns their place

A straightforward estate with a clear will and a willing executor is genuinely manageable without professional help, and the three question check above tells most families their route immediately. The situations that justify a probate specialist are the ones this guide has flagged along the way: no will and a family tree that needs tracing, a will with no usable executor, minor beneficiaries requiring two administrators, or disagreement about who should apply. If any of those describe your situation, we can put you in touch with a probate specialist who handles that exact scenario, so you know within one conversation whether you can safely run the application yourself or should hand it over.