WillSum
The honest sums on wills and probate
Statutory fees for three nations, HMRC's thresholds and firms' own published prices, each one quoted, dated and open. No forms, no sales calls, nothing collected.
Wills, probate and powers of attorney are priced by three different kinds of body at once: a court or a registry that sets a fee nobody can change, a revenue service that sets a threshold, and firms that set their own prices and mostly have to publish them. WillSum reads all three, quotes them, and stamps every figure with the day it was read.
What a will costs
£240 to £500 for a single straightforward will, across the firms we readWhat firms publish for a straightforward will, quoted word for word, with the free and low cost routes beside them and a plain steer on what you actually need.
What a power of attorney costs
£92 to register one lasting power of attorneyWhat the state charges to register one, what firms charge to draft it, and the reduction that sits one paragraph below the fee and almost nowhere else.
Paying less for a power of attorney
£46 to register one LPA or EPA with a 50% remissionWho pays half, who pays nothing, the Universal Credit rule some guides get backwards, and why the form goes in with the application.
What probate costs
£526 is the court fee in England and WalesThe routes that cost nothing first, then every court fee in all three nations, including the ones nobody else lists. The same fee whatever the estate is worth.
Do you need probate at all
Ten banks and building societies, in their own wordsThe line each bank publishes, below which it pays out without a grant, read off its own bereavement page and dated. Some publish none, and we say so.
What firms charge for probate
£900 to £1,950 before VAT to get the grant, across the firms we read to get the grant, across the firms we readPublished prices, quoted from each firm's own page and dated, and what we found when we checked the court fee those pages print.
Inheritance Tax
£325,000, the threshold below which there is normally no Inheritance TaxThe two thresholds, what the rate is actually charged on, and the rule that costs unmarried couples more than anything else in this subject.
Straight to the sources: every firm's own price page, the Office of the Public Guardian's own fee page, the Office of the Public Guardian's own help-with-fees form, the court's own fees page, HMRC's own thresholds table.
Something we found while reading those price pages
Of the twelve pricing pages we read that print the court fee, nine print one that is out of date. Every one of those is understated, so every total built on it is too low. The fee the court itself publishes is £526 in England and Wales.
We did not write that down once and leave it. Each firm's stated fee is held beside the official one in the data, and the build compares them and recounts the tally every time it runs, so the finding cannot quietly go stale in a sentence nobody rereads.
If somebody has died, start here
Before anything else: you might not need probate. If everything was held jointly, or there were only savings, it may pass to the survivor without a grant at all. Ring the bank and ask. It costs a phone call and it can save you the fee, the forms and the firm.
Who that applies to: Anyone dealing with an estate where the person who died only had savings, or held shares, money, land or property jointly with somebody else who survives them. Joint tenancies and joint accounts normally pass to the survivor automatically. Each bank, insurer and building society sets its own limit, so the answer comes from ringing them, not from a guide.
Source: HM Courts and Tribunals Service, read 24 September 2026.
How this site works
- Every figure names the body that sets it, links its own page, and carries the date we read it and the date it is due a re-read.
- England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are kept apart. All three charge differently for the same job, and every fee here says which one it belongs to.
- Where we have done the arithmetic ourselves, the page says so beside the number rather than passing it off as published.
- A figure we cannot verify is left out. A page with a gap in it is better than a page with a guess in it.
- Every figure is open data at /api/metrics.json, with its source and both its dates.
What WillSum is not
There is no form anywhere on this site. No name, no email, no postcode, no telephone number. We do not draft wills, we do not do probate, we are on nobody's panel and we are not paid to send you to anybody. The biggest business in this market is taking the details of somebody who has just been bereaved and selling them on, and that is the one thing this site will never do.