What documents do you need to apply for probate?

The full checklist, up front

To apply for probate in England and Wales you need the original will and any codicils (if there is a will), the official death certificate, and a completed application, made online or on paper form PA1P (where there is a will) or PA1A (where there is not). Alongside those, you need the estate's gross and net valuation figures, confirmation that the inheritance tax reporting step has been completed, and the £526 application fee if the estate is worth more than £5,000. That is the whole list; the rest of this page explains each item and the order to tackle them in. It is general information to help you prepare, not legal or financial advice for your specific situation.

The original will and the death certificate

These two cause the most failed first attempts, because copies are not good enough. GOV.UK's PA1P guidance is blunt about it: "You will need to submit the original will and the official death certificate. Photocopies of these documents will not be accepted." Any codicils (later documents amending the will) must go in with the original will, because together they form the document the registry proves.

Two practical points follow. First, the original will does not come back: once the grant is issued it is kept by HM Courts and Tribunals Service and becomes a public record, so take a good copy for your own file before sending it. The death certificate, by contrast, is returned to you. Second, if you cannot locate the original will, stop and search properly before applying; our guide on what to do if you cannot find a will sets out where to look and the fallback route (form PA13) if it is genuinely lost.

The right application: online, PA1P or PA1A

Per GOV.UK's application guidance, you can apply online or by post. On paper, the form depends on one question: is there a will? With a will, executors use form PA1P. Without one, the closest living relative applies on form PA1A for letters of administration instead of a grant of probate. The forms ask for details about you, the person who died, the will (if any), and the estate's values, so it saves time to have everything gathered before you start. GOV.UK notes that paper applications take longer to process than online ones, so the online route is usually the sensible default where it is available for your situation.

The inheritance tax step comes first

You cannot finish a probate application until the estate's inheritance tax position is sorted, and what that means depends on the type of estate. Most smaller and simpler estates qualify as excepted estates, and for deaths on or after 1 January 2022 there is no separate IHT form at all for them: the old IHT205 was abolished, and you simply report the estate's estimated values within the probate application itself. Estates that do not qualify must send full form IHT400 to HMRC, start paying any tax due, and then wait for HMRC to send a unique code before the probate application can be submitted. Working out which side of the line an estate falls on is covered step by step in our IHT400 and excepted estates walkthrough.

Either way, you need valuation figures. The application asks for the estate's gross value (everything owned) and net value (after debts), so the groundwork in our guide to valuing an estate for probate has to happen before the form does.

The fee, and how many copies to order

Under the current GOV.UK fee schedule, the application fee is £526 where the estate is worth over £5,000, and nothing where it is £5,000 or less. Extra sealed copies of the grant cost £2 each if ordered when you apply, but £16 each if you come back for them later, an eightfold difference, so order enough at the outset. Each bank, insurer and land registry process typically wants to see a sealed copy, and our guide on how many copies of the grant you need gives a sensible rule of thumb. If money is tight, help with fees may be available, and the wider costs picture (including whether the £5,000 threshold spares the estate a fee at all) sits in the full probate guide, which is the fuller companion to this checklist.

Once the envelope is sealed

With the will, death certificate, application and fee submitted, the waiting starts. Timescales vary with the registry's workload and whether anything in the application needs a follow-up question, so run your circumstances through our probate timeline estimator for a realistic expectation, and see how long probate takes for what drives the variation. Missing documents are the classic avoidable delay: an application that arrives without the original will, or before HMRC's code has been issued, goes to the back of the queue. If the estate has awkward elements (a hard-to-find will, overseas assets, an IHT400 estate with tax to fund), a probate specialist can take the document-gathering and the application off your hands entirely; getting the bundle right first time is precisely the kind of unglamorous work they do well.