Most estates pay no inheritance tax at all. Those are the ones that lose the most money.

Probably not. Only a small minority of estates in England and Wales pay any inheritance tax at all, and the reason is that the allowances are larger than most people realise once they are stacked properly. Everyone has a nil-rate band of £325,000, frozen at that level until April 2031. Where a home passes to direct descendants there is an additional residence nil-rate band of £175,000. And where a spouse or civil partner died first without using their bands, the unused percentage transfers to the survivor and is applied to today’s figures — so a widowed estate with a home going to the children can have £1,000,000 of allowance before anything is payable. Everything passing to a surviving spouse or civil partner is exempt in its own right, in almost all cases without limit. The traps are on the edges. The residence band is withdrawn by £1 for every £2 the estate exceeds £2,000,000, and that £2m test is applied to the estate after liabilities but before reliefs and exemptions — so a farm attracting full agricultural relief still counts towards it. The transferable bands are claims with a two-year deadline, not automatic entitlements. And direct descendants means children, grandchildren and their descendants, including step, adopted, fostered and guardianship children and the spouse of a descendant — but not nieces, nephews or siblings, however close they were to the deceased.

Because it is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole of probate, and it runs in the opposite direction to everyone’s instinct. Executors reason that a conservative valuation is the safe choice, and where tax is payable there is at least an argument about that. Where no tax is payable there is none, and the low figure is a pure loss. Here is the mechanism. When somebody dies, their assets are rebased for capital gains tax purposes to their market value at the date of death, and that value becomes the acquisition cost for whoever inherits. There is a rule that ties the capital gains figure to the inheritance tax figure — but it only bites where inheritance tax was chargeable and a value was actually ascertained. In an estate below the threshold neither is true. HMRC says so in its own manual, in terms: where there is no tax to pay because the estate is below the threshold, the fact that HMRC accepts this does not mean it has implicitly accepted the value of any property in the estate, and no value has been ascertained for capital gains purposes. So nothing is agreed and nothing binds anyone. The practical consequence is that a house genuinely worth £500,000 but written down at £460,000 to keep things simple has created £40,000 of taxable gain out of nothing. If the estate sells, personal representatives pay a flat 24% — about £9,600, for no benefit whatsoever. The honest limit on this: it does not make the value a free choice. It still has to be a genuine open market figure, and the same absence of agreement that frees you also frees HMRC to attack an unsupported number downward later. The answer is an accurate valuation with the comparable evidence kept on file, not a high one.

No, and you should be wary of anybody unregulated who says yes. Preparing the papers on which to found a grant of probate or letters of administration is a reserved legal activity under Schedule 2 of the Legal Services Act 2007. Carrying on a reserved legal activity without being authorised is a criminal offence carrying up to two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine on indictment, and a firm is separately liable for what its employees do. There is an exemption for a person acting with no fee, gain or reward, but “gain or reward” is considerably wider than a fee, and doing it free of charge in the expectation of winning the sale instruction is not obviously outside it. We do not go near any of it. We are also not solicitors and not regulated by the SRA or CILEx, and we say so plainly because the Competition and Markets Authority has been writing to unregulated probate and will-writing providers about exactly that since October 2024, and since April 2025 it has been able to fine them directly. What is not reserved, and is genuinely useful, is everything else: valuing the estate’s property on the statutory basis with evidence attached, protecting and insuring an empty house, advising on whether to sell, let or transfer it, and handling the sale once the grant is issued. Estate administration after the grant is not a reserved activity either. Our position is that we are the property specialist working alongside the solicitor, and we are happy to be instructed by yours and to report to them.

This is the deadlock, and it catches almost every executor. Inheritance tax on everything except land and buildings is due by the end of the sixth month after the month in which the person died. Interest runs from that date whether or not you have the grant — currently 7.75%, a rate that tracks Bank Rate and has changed four times since April 2025, so check it rather than take a figure from a website. Meanwhile HMRC will not issue the code you need to apply for the grant until the tax is paid, and you cannot get at the deceased’s money to pay it until you have the grant. There are three ways out. The Direct Payment Scheme is the main one: banks, building societies, NS&I and some investment providers will pay HMRC directly from the deceased’s accounts before the grant is issued. A separate form goes to each institution, and participation is voluntary, so check that yours takes part. Second, tax attributable to land and buildings can be paid in ten equal yearly instalments, which takes the pressure off the largest number in most estates — but the whole outstanding balance becomes payable immediately if the property is sold, and interest is charged on the outstanding balance for later instalments. From April 2026 instalments on business and agricultural property qualify for interest-free treatment; land held purely as an investment does not. Third, executors sometimes borrow, either commercially or from a beneficiary. The probate application fee itself is £526 for an estate over £5,000, with copies at £2 each ordered at the same time, and the published service standard for the grant is up to twelve weeks.

Less than people expect, and the two things everybody “knows” are both wrong. Gifts made more than seven years before death drop out entirely. Gifts within seven years come back into account, and are set against the nil-rate band first, in chronological order, oldest first — only whatever is left over shelters the death estate. That is why gifts hurt even when no tax is charged on them: they consume the band. Now the first misunderstanding. Taper relief reduces the tax on a gift, not its value, and it only operates where there is tax to reduce. If the gift sits inside the available nil-rate band, no tax arises on it and taper relief is worth precisely nothing. A £200,000 gift made four years before death gets no benefit from taper at all, whatever any article says. Taper only helps where the gift itself, after cumulation, exceeds the band. The second misunderstanding is about who pays. Where tax is due on a failed gift, the person who received it is primarily liable, not the estate. The executors only become liable if it is still unpaid twelve months after the end of the month of death. That matters enormously for how the estate is divided, because if the residue quietly absorbs the tax on a gift, the beneficiaries of the residue are paying for a gift somebody else received. And one further trap: a gift into a trust is immediately chargeable rather than potentially exempt, and remains in the cumulative total of any later gift made within seven years of death — which can pull the look-back out to nearly fourteen years.

The insurance, today, before anything else. This is the most common expensive mistake in probate and it has nothing to do with tax. A standard household policy is written on the assumption that somebody lives in the property. Once it is unoccupied, cover is typically restricted or withdrawn — commonly somewhere between thirty and sixty days, though it genuinely varies by insurer and you must read the actual policy rather than trust a number you read anywhere, including here. The first things to go are usually escape of water, theft and malicious damage, which are precisely what happens to empty houses. Separately, the insurer has to be told about the death, and cover can lapse simply because nobody did. Get an unoccupied or probate policy and then read its conditions, because they are the part that voids claims: most require documented inspections on a fixed cycle, the water drained down over winter, the property properly secured, and sometimes the heating maintained at a minimum temperature. After the insurance: redirect the post, because an accumulating pile at the door advertises an empty house; take meter readings and tell the utilities; and deal with council tax, where an empty property in probate is exempt while the grant is pending and for six months after it is issued — after which the empty homes premium starts and becomes a serious annual number. And photograph and inventory the contents before anything is cleared, because clearance destroys the evidence for the chattels figure in the account.

This is worth real money and it is the option executors are least often offered. There are three routes, not two. If the personal representatives sell, the gain belongs to the estate: a flat 24% rate, and a single £3,000 annual exempt amount for the whole estate, available only for the tax year of death and the two tax years after it. If the property is instead appropriated to the beneficiaries before it is sold, the appropriation itself is not a disposal, and each beneficiary is treated as having acquired at the date-of-death value. They then each have their own £3,000 allowance, may pay 18% to the extent the gain falls within their unused basic rate band, and may have main residence relief if the property is or becomes their home. On a £60,000 gain split four ways between basic-rate beneficiaries, that is roughly £8,600 of tax instead of £13,700. The third route is letting it, which brings the estate into income tax during the administration, brings the full weight of letting compliance and deposit protection with it, and can jeopardise the private residence relief the personal representatives might otherwise have claimed on a sale. Three warnings. The appropriation must be effective and documented before exchange, by deed — done afterwards it simply does not work. It puts the gain on the beneficiaries’ own tax returns, which they may not welcome. And appropriating before the estate’s debts are known is risky. Also note the 60-day reporting deadline for capital gains tax on UK residential property, which applies to personal representatives too. This is a tax question: we will model it and put it in writing so you can take it to your solicitor or accountant, and we will not implement it.

Very nearly, at one specific point, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of the tax that almost nobody uses. Where at least 10% of the baseline amount is left to charity, the rate of inheritance tax on the whole of that part of the estate drops from 40% to 36%. The baseline amount is broadly the chargeable estate after reliefs and after exemptions other than the charitable one, less the available nil-rate band. Because the rate cut applies to everything, not just to the amount given, the reduction in tax offsets most or all of the gift — at the crossover point the family receives about the same and the charity receives the lot. Below 10% the gift costs the family real money; at exactly 10% it is close to free; above 10% the family is worse off again, so it is a threshold to hit precisely rather than exceed. Two cautions. The 10% test is applied component by component — the survivorship component covering jointly held property, the settled property component, and the general component are each tested separately, with elections available to merge them or to opt out. A calculation that tests the estate as a whole gives the wrong answer whenever there is jointly owned property, and the tool on this page only models the general component. Second, this can only be achieved by the will, or after death by a deed of variation within two years, which requires the agreement of the beneficiaries who give up the money. Get it calculated properly by somebody who does it for a living; the arithmetic is worth the fee several times over.

£395 for a probate valuation on the statutory open market basis, with the comparable evidence attached rather than referred to, condition and tenure dealt with explicitly, and a photographic inventory of the contents before anything is cleared. Where no inheritance tax is payable we will tell you what that means for the capital gains base cost, because it is the single most valuable thing we know and nobody else mentions it. £750 for the full property report: the valuation, plus all three routes for the house modelled on your figures — sale by the estate, appropriation to beneficiaries then sale, and letting — with the tax on each, and an achievable price against a realistic marketing period. £125 a month for looking after an empty property: documented inspections on the cycle your insurer requires, water drained down in winter, meters, post, contractors supervised and a written record of everyone who entered. 1.25% to sell it. What we will not do: prepare your probate application, which is a reserved legal activity and a criminal offence for us; hold ourselves out as solicitors or as regulated, because we are neither; tell you what figure to put on the form, or sell you a high one, because the standard is genuine open market value and it is you who signs the return and carries the penalty; or advise you on your tax position, which we will model in writing for you to take to somebody qualified. If the estate is small, straightforward and has no property complication, we will tell you that you probably do not need us.