How much does probate cost for a simple estate?

Price the estate, not the paperwork

Almost everyone asking this has already decided the answer. One house, a will, a family that gets on, so the estate must be simple and the cost must be small. Often that is right, and the total lands between £550 and £900 handled personally, most of it the £526 application fee. But simple is a technical test, not a description of how a family feels about each other, and a few ordinary details fail it quietly, months before anyone notices what they did to the bill.

So this page runs in the useful order: the test, then the price that follows from it, then the six things that most often move an estate across the line. The probate cost calculator itemises each line for your own figures as you read. This is general information about England and Wales, not legal or financial advice.

The test: five conditions, all of them required

There is no statutory definition of a "simple estate". The closest official equivalent is HMRC's excepted estate test, which decides whether you report the estate's value in a few boxes on the probate application or file a full IHT400 account. Add the practical realities of administration and the working test comes to five conditions:

1. A valid will, with executors willing to act. No will means letters of administration under the intestacy rules: the same court fee, but more work and a fixed order of who may apply.
2. The estate is an excepted estate and no inheritance tax is payable. Per HMRC's guidance on the type of estate, that generally means below the £325,000 nil rate band, or £650,000 or less where a late spouse's whole threshold transfers, or under £3 million where everything passes to a spouse, civil partner or charity.
3. The assets have obvious values. One home, one or two bank accounts, maybe premium bonds or listed shares. Nothing needing a specialist to put a number on it.
4. Every beneficiary is alive, identifiable and contactable.
5. Nobody is arguing. No caveat, no claim, no disagreement about who should be doing what.

All five, not most of them. Condition two carries the weight: it decides whether you fill in a short form or a long one, and whether money must leave the estate before the grant is issued.

What a genuinely simple estate costs

Assume all five conditions hold. Here is the whole bill, doing it yourself:

Item	Cost	Notes
Probate application fee	£526	Over £5,000; nothing at £5,000 or less (gov.uk). Rose from £300 on 13 July 2026.
Sealed copies of the grant	£2 each	With the application. £16 each afterwards, so order generously.
Extra death certificates	£12.50 each	General Register Office standard service (gov.uk).
Bankruptcy searches	£2 per beneficiary	Before distributing, to protect the executor personally.
Statutory notices	£150 to £300 (observed)	Gazette plus a local paper. Optional, market prices not a set fee.
Valuations	£0 in most simple cases	Free agent appraisals where no tax is due. A formal RICS report is an observed £250 to £900.
Typical total	£550 to £900	Under £600 without statutory notices.

Buying help changes the shape of the bill, never the court fee, which is identical for everyone. A grant only service, where a professional prepares and submits the application and you do the rest, is commonly quoted at an observed £500 to £1,500 plus VAT, an all in total of roughly £1,200 to £2,800. Full administration of a simple estate with one property is more often observed at £2,000 to £5,000. Our guides to probate costs across all estate types and what probate solicitors charge break those quotes down, the DIY route is costed line by line in its own guide, and the probate court fees page covers the court's own charges.

Six things that quietly break the test

None of these are exotic. They are ordinary features of ordinary lives, and each one adds forms, and usually cost.

1. A gift in the last seven years

The most common failure by a distance. Anything given away in the seven years before death is added back before the nil rate band is applied. Two exemptions do the heavy lifting: £3,000 a year (carried forward one year only, so £6,000 at most) and gifts of up to £250 per person per year, per gov.uk's gifts guidance. Regular gifts out of surplus income are exempt too, but need a documented pattern of income and expenditure that nobody keeps unless told to. Taper relief helps less than people expect: it only bites once the gifts themselves exceed £325,000. And gifts totalling over £250,000 in those seven years break the excepted rules on their own. Our seven year rule explainer has the arithmetic.

2. A property held as tenants in common

Joint owners come in two flavours and only one is simple. With joint tenants, gov.uk says the property "automatically goes to the other owners if you die". A tenant in common's share "does not automatically go to the other owners". It falls into the estate, has to be valued, and often sits inside a will trust, which is where an ordinary estate acquires a trustee, a Trust Registration Service question and a professional bill. Check the Land Registry title for a Form A restriction; couples often changed the tenancy years ago on advice and never mentioned it again. Our guides to jointly owned assets and declarations of trust show how to tell.

3. A transferable nil rate band nobody has claimed

Where a spouse or civil partner died first leaving everything to the survivor, the survivor's estate can use both allowances, up to £650,000. That transfer is never automatic. It must be claimed, and it only fits the excepted estate route where the whole of the first allowance went unused. A modest legacy to a child or friend on the first death used some of it, so the estate drops out of the excepted rules into a full account. Claiming also means digging out the first death certificate, will and grant, sometimes from decades ago: cheap, but slow.

4. A beneficiary who died before the person who made the will

A gift to someone who died first normally lapses. The exception is section 33 of the Wills Act 1837, which saves a gift to a child or remoter descendant who left children of their own, passing it down to them. Otherwise the gift drops into the residue, and if the residuary gift is the one that lapsed, part of the estate passes under the intestacy rules instead of the will. Half testate and half intestate is not a DIY afternoon.

5. Assets abroad

A Spanish apartment, a French bank account, a holding left over from years working overseas. Foreign assets worth more than £100,000 break the excepted rules by themselves, and an English grant has no authority abroad, so a separate process usually runs in the other country under its own succession rules and taxes. Our guide to overseas assets in probate has the mechanics.

6. A business, or a share of one

A sole trade, a partnership share or shares in a private company all need valuing, which is expert work, and any claim to business relief goes on a full account with its own schedule. Even where relief wipes out the tax, the estate is not simple: relief has to be claimed and justified, never assumed. A dormant company nobody struck off counts too.

Worked example: one estate, two prices

Bernadette Ollerton, a retired teacher, died at 79 in Shrewsbury. She never married and had no children. Her friends Marek and Suzanne, named as executors in her 2019 will and neither of them beneficiaries, expected an afternoon's work. Her estate:

• Flat, mortgage free: £268,000
• Current and savings accounts: £41,000
• Premium bonds: £9,000
• Total: £318,000, left equally to her brother and her niece

Version one: as it appears

£318,000 sits below the £325,000 nil rate band. No residence nil rate band applies, because the flat goes to a brother and a niece rather than direct descendants, but none is needed. The estate is excepted and no tax is payable. Marek and Suzanne apply themselves: £526 fee, four sealed copies at £2, three death certificates at £12.50, two bankruptcy searches at £6 through the HM Land Registry portal. Total £583.50, or roughly £735 to £885 with statutory notices. Grant issued, accounts closed, flat sold.

Version two: the detail they found in a drawer

Bernadette gave her niece £60,000 four years before she died, towards a house deposit. She used no other exemptions that year or the year before, so £6,000 of annual exemption applies and £54,000 is added back. Gifts are set against the nil rate band first, leaving £271,000 for the estate itself. The estate is £318,000, so £47,000 is taxable at 40%: £18,800 of inheritance tax on an estate everyone had already written off as untaxed. Taper relief does nothing here, because the gift is nowhere near £325,000 on its own.

The cost consequences follow at once. The estate is no longer excepted, so a full IHT400 account is needed. The tax must be paid before the grant is issued, out of an account frozen until the grant exists, which usually means the direct payment scheme. The flat now wants a defensible valuation rather than a friendly agent's letter, because HMRC can challenge it. Two lay executors carrying personal liability for the tax figure sensibly take advice, at an observed £2,000 to £5,000. The court fee is still exactly £526. Everything else has changed, and one kind gesture four years earlier did all of it.

How to tell which side of the line you are on

Six checks, about an hour, and it is the hour that decides your number:

• Ask about gifts. Not "did they give anything away" but "what happened in the last seven years", asked of everyone who might know. Bank statements are the only reliable check.
• Pull the Land Registry title and look for a restriction indicating tenants in common.
• Check whether a spouse died first, and if so whether their will left everything to the survivor.
• Read the will against the facts. Is every named beneficiary alive? Does any gift name an asset that no longer exists?
• Look for anything overseas or self employed in the last tax return or bank statement.
• Confirm a grant is needed at all. Some estates never require one, and then the cost question disappears: see whether you need probate and the do I need probate checker.

If all six come back clean, the £550 to £900 figure is real. If one comes back messy, price the estate you actually have. The probate cost calculator takes the complicating lines, and the probate hub covers the process end to end. Two narrower questions have their own pages: what the grant itself costs and what a probate valuation costs.

Failing the test is not a disaster, just a different job at a different price, and knowing that in week one beats discovering it in month six. If a gift, a tenancy in common, a business share or an unclaimed allowance has surfaced in your paperwork, ask us and we will connect you with a vetted probate specialist who will quote for the estate you actually have.