Should you accept the role at all?
Most people find out they are an executor at the worst possible moment, assume they have no choice, and start opening post. That is a mistake worth avoiding, because the decision to act is genuinely yours - right up until the moment you start dealing with the estate, at which point it stops being yours. Work through the branches below before you touch anything.
- 1 The estate is straightforward and you have the time→ Act. A will, a couple of bank accounts, a house passing to the obvious beneficiary and no inheritance tax is entirely manageable without a solicitor. Budget six to twelve months of intermittent admin, take the standard protections, and keep beneficiaries informed in writing.
- 2 You will act, but one part of it worries you - usually the tax→ Act, and buy advice on that point alone. Paying a solicitor or accountant for a few hours on the inheritance tax position or an awkward valuation is far cheaper than handing over a percentage of the whole estate, and it puts the technical risk where it belongs.
- 3 The family is already arguing, or a claim looks likely→ Think hard. A contested estate is where personal liability actually bites, and where an independent professional executor earns their fee. You can renounce, or take advice first and act with proper protections in place - but do not drift into it.
- 4 You do not want to do it, and you have not started→ Renounce, formally, using a form of renunciation (PA15) filed with the probate registry. Do it before you deal with any asset. If there is another executor named, they can proceed alone; if not, someone entitled under the will or the intestacy rules applies as administrator instead.
- 5 You are one of several executors and would rather not be involved→ Ask for power reserved. The other executors act, your name comes off the day-to-day work, and you keep the right to step in later if something goes wrong. It is the middle option most people do not know exists.
The full list of executor duties, in order
Executor duties are usually presented as a flat list. They are better understood as a sequence, because several of them create problems if taken out of turn - distributing before the debts are known, or paying creditors in the wrong order, are the two that most often turn an administrative slip into a personal bill. Each step below carries the risk attached to it.
Locate the last valid will and check whether it has been superseded. Register the death within five days in England and Wales, order several certified copies of the death certificate at the same time, and use Tell Us Once to notify government departments in a single step.
Acting on an out-of-date will. If a later will turns up after you have distributed, the money still has to go to the right people - and you may be the one recovering it.
Before anything else, protect what is there. Change the locks on an empty property if the keys are unaccounted for, remove valuables or photograph and store them, cancel standing orders and subscriptions, and stop any regular payments that no longer serve a purpose.
Empty homes are the classic trap. Most household policies restrict or void cover once a property is unoccupied for 30 to 60 days. Tell the insurer immediately and arrange specialist unoccupied-property cover - an uninsured burst pipe in an empty house is a loss the beneficiaries can look to you for.
Write to every bank, provider, pension scheme and registrar for date-of-death balances. Get a professional valuation of any property (an estate agent appraisal is often enough for a modest non-taxable estate; a RICS valuation is safer where inheritance tax is in play). List debts as well as assets - mortgage, credit cards, outstanding tax, funeral account.
Guessed property values on a taxable estate. HMRC can and does challenge them, and penalties for a careless valuation land on the executor.
Work out whether the estate is excepted or whether a full IHT account is needed, then report to HMRC. Where tax is due, it generally has to be paid before the grant is issued - which creates the familiar squeeze of needing the grant to access money to pay the tax. HMRC's direct payment scheme lets banks pay it straight from the deceased's accounts, and tax on property can be paid in instalments.
This is the single most common place executors get professional help on one point only, and rightly so. Errors here carry interest and penalties - and they are yours, not the estate's, if they arose from your carelessness.
Apply online or on paper. The court fee is £526 for estates over £5,000 and nothing below that. Order extra sealed copies with the application at £2 each - they cost £16 each afterwards. The grant currently takes around 8 to 16 weeks to arrive.
Ordering too few copies. Every institution wants to see one, and doing them one at a time by post adds weeks.
Send a sealed copy of the grant to each institution and have the money paid into an executor's account - a separate account, never your own. Sell or transfer shares, deal with the property, close accounts, and keep a running record of every penny in and out.
Mixing estate money with your own. Even where nothing improper happens, it makes the estate accounts impossible to prove and is the fastest route to a beneficiary dispute.
Funeral and testamentary expenses first, then secured creditors, then preferential debts, then unsecured creditors. Only when the debts are settled do beneficiaries get anything. Where the estate cannot pay everything, that order is not a guideline - it is the law.
Paying the sympathetic creditor, or a beneficiary, ahead of the order. If a properly ranked creditor then goes unpaid, the executor makes up the difference personally.
Two separate jobs that are easy to conflate. First, the deceased's own income tax up to the date of death - a final return may be needed, and there is often a refund. Second, any income the estate earns during the administration period - rent, interest, dividends - which is taxable in the hands of the estate and reported to beneficiaries on form R185 so they can account for it themselves.
Forgetting the second one entirely. A property let out for eight months during administration generates estate income that HMRC will want reported.
Pay the specific gifts, then the residue. Get a receipt for everything. If a beneficiary is a minor, or cannot be found, or has died, take advice before paying anyone - those situations have their own rules and their own liabilities.
Timing. This is the step where the liability is sharpest, and it is covered in full below.
A clear statement of everything that came in, everything that went out, and how the residue was divided. Residuary beneficiaries are entitled to see them and to have them approved. Keep the file for several years afterwards - questions can surface long after the money has gone.
No accounts at all. It is the most common complaint beneficiaries make about lay executors, and a court can compel you to produce them.
Two of those steps deserve emphasis because they are the ones lay executors most often skip. Insuring an empty property is not optional housekeeping - a house standing empty for a couple of months usually falls outside the terms of the existing policy, and the insurer needs telling before that happens rather than after. And the estate accounts at the end are not a formality either: they are what turns "trust me, I handled it" into something a beneficiary can check, which is why the estates that produce them almost never end up in dispute.
Personal liability - and the four protections
An executor holds the estate for other people. If a loss arises because of something you did or failed to do, the person who has lost out can look to you to make it good - not to the estate, which by then has usually gone. That is the whole of the principle, and it sounds worse than it is in practice. Thousands of ordinary people administer estates every year without incident, because the realistic risks are few and each has a well-worn protection against it.
The four things that go wrong
- Distributing too early and then meeting a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975.
- Missing a creditor you did not know existed - an old loan, a care-home account, an overpayment of benefits.
- Getting the inheritance tax wrong, whether by undervaluing a property or missing a lifetime gift within seven years of death.
- Failing to protect an asset - the uninsured empty house, the classic car left on a driveway, the share portfolio nobody looked at for a year.
The four protections
- Statutory advertisements. Place notices in the London Gazette and a newspaper local to the deceased, giving creditors at least two months and a day to come forward. Do that and, under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925, you can distribute without personal liability to creditors you did not know about. It costs roughly £200 to £300 and is the single best value protection available to an executor. It does not excuse you from making the searches you reasonably ought to make, and it gives no protection against missed beneficiaries - only unknown creditors.
- The six-month wait. Do not distribute until at least six months have run from the date of the grant. That is the period in which an Inheritance Act 1975 claim can normally be brought, and waiting it out is the conventional advice for a reason.
- Advice on the specific point. Buying a few hours on the inheritance tax position, a disputed valuation or an ambiguous clause is far cheaper than a percentage-based retainer over the whole estate - and it moves the technical risk to someone who is insured for it.
- Executor insurance. Missing beneficiary cover, missing will cover and general executor liability policies exist and are usually paid for by the estate. On a straightforward estate they are unnecessary. Where there is an untraced relative, a possible later will or a complicated family, they are proportionate.
None of this makes an executor a guarantor of perfection. The duty is to act honestly and with reasonable care, not to be infallible - and an executor who takes the standard protections and keeps proper records has done what the role requires.
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How to renounce - and the intermeddling trap
Being named in a will imposes no obligation to act. If you do not want the job you can renounce: sign a form of renunciation (form PA15 in England and Wales) in front of an independent witness - not a family member and not anyone named in the will - and file it with the probate registry along with the original will. It is a clean exit, and it is free.
It is also a one-way door in both directions. Renunciation is final: having renounced, you cannot later change your mind and apply. And the right to renounce disappears the moment you intermeddle in the estate.
Intermeddling means doing something only an executor would do - taking up the role in substance, whatever you have or have not signed. Things that will normally count:
- Paying the funeral bill from the deceased's own bank account
- Closing, transferring or drawing on accounts in their name
- Selling, giving away or disposing of their possessions
- Collecting rent, or dealing with tenants, on an estate property
- Writing to banks or providers describing yourself as the executor
Purely protective or humane acts - arranging the funeral personally, securing an empty house, looking after a pet - are generally treated differently, but the line is not always obvious and the consequences of misjudging it are permanent. If there is any chance you will want to step back, do nothing with the estate until you have decided. Once you have intermeddled, renunciation is off the table and stepping down usually needs the court's permission.
There is a middle option that far fewer people know about. Where a will names several executors, one or more can have power reserved: the others take the grant and do the work, while the executor with power reserved stays off the day-to-day administration but keeps the right to apply later if circumstances change. It suits the sibling who lives abroad, or the executor who trusts the others to get on with it but wants a way back in if they do not. It is not the same as renouncing, and it is much easier to reverse.
Executor vs administrator vs attorney
These three get muddled constantly, and the third confusion in particular causes real distress at exactly the wrong moment.
| Role | Where the authority comes from | When it operates | Key point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Executor | Named in the will; confirmed by a grant of probate | After death | Authority derives from the will itself, so limited steps are possible before the grant arrives |
| Administrator | Appointed under the intestacy rules; grant of letters of administration | After death, where there is no valid will or no willing executor | Same duties and same personal liability, but no authority at all until the grant issues |
| Attorney under an LPA | A registered lasting power of attorney | During the donor's lifetime only | Ends completely at death. An LPA gives you no authority over the estate |
This is the single most common misunderstanding in the whole subject. An attorney who has managed someone's finances for years - paying the care fees, running the accounts, selling the house - loses that authority instantly on death. The bank freezes the accounts. The direct debits you were managing are no longer yours to manage.
From that moment, only the executor named in the will can act, and it may well be somebody else. Attorneys who carry on regardless, in good faith, are acting without authority - and if they are not the executor, they may be intermeddling in an estate that is not theirs to touch. The two documents do different jobs at different times: an LPA protects someone during life, a will and executor deal with everything afterwards. Both are worth having, and neither substitutes for the other.
Can an executor be a beneficiary?
Yes - and in most wills the executor is a beneficiary. Appointing the spouse, or the adult children who will inherit, is the normal pattern and there is nothing improper about it. It does not affect your right to inherit, it does not affect your right to act, and it does not need disclosing to anyone as some kind of conflict.
The rule people are half-remembering applies to witnesses. Under the Wills Act 1837, a witness to a will - or the spouse or civil partner of a witness - cannot benefit under it. The will remains valid; the gift to them simply fails. So the practical guidance is the opposite of what many people assume: by all means appoint a beneficiary as executor, but never ask one to witness the signature. Wills are still routinely wrecked by a well-meaning relative signing as witness to a document that leaves them the house.
What being both does change is the optics. An executor-beneficiary should be scrupulous about record-keeping and about treating the other beneficiaries evenly, precisely because a dispute about, say, who got the furniture is much easier to answer with an itemised account than with a recollection.
Getting paid vs claiming expenses
The distinction is sharp and worth getting right, because expenses are the item beneficiaries query most often.
Expenses you can reclaim from the estate: the £526 court fee, sealed copies of the grant, statutory notices, property insurance, valuations, house clearance, travel, postage, professional fees you have properly incurred. Keep every receipt and put them in the estate accounts.
Your time is different. A lay executor cannot generally charge for it. Payment for the work itself requires a charging clause in the will authorising it - and if the will is silent, months of your evenings and weekends go unpaid, however unfair that feels. This is precisely why professional executors are appointed under wills that include such a clause as a matter of course, and it is what a bank or solicitor is relying on when they charge a percentage of the estate for the same work you could do for the court fee.
A professional executor charging a percentage of the estate - commonly around 4% for a bank, 1% to 5% for a solicitor - can cost tens of thousands on an estate that a fixed-fee provider would administer for a few thousand, or that you could handle yourself for the court fee. The work does not get harder as the estate gets bigger. The bill does.
A named professional executor can often be asked to renounce or to step aside in favour of the family, particularly if approached before they have started work. It is always worth asking before you accept the quote. Our probate cost calculator compares the routes on your own figures.
What beneficiaries can - and cannot - demand
Residuary beneficiaries are entitled to see the estate accounts: what came in, what went out, what expenses were claimed, how the residue was worked out. That is a genuine entitlement, not a courtesy, and a court can compel an executor to produce them.
What beneficiaries are not entitled to is a running commentary, sight of every piece of correspondence, or the right to direct how you exercise a discretion the will gives you. Nor can they set your timetable: an executor who waits the conventional six months before distributing is doing the job properly, not stalling, and saying so plainly usually settles it.
Where an executor genuinely will not act - months of silence, no application, no accounts - beneficiaries can apply to the court to compel them to proceed, or to have them removed and someone substituted. In practice, very few disputes are caused by wrongdoing. Almost all are caused by silence. A short written update every couple of months, even one that says nothing has moved, prevents the overwhelming majority of them.
Insolvent estates and the statutory order of payment
If the debts exceed the assets, the estate is insolvent and the rules change from guidance into strict law. The order in which debts are paid is fixed:
| Order | Category | Typical examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Funeral and testamentary expenses | Reasonable funeral costs, the court fee, statutory notices, valuations, the costs of administering the estate |
| 2 | Secured creditors | A mortgage or secured loan, out of the asset it is secured against |
| 3 | Preferential debts | Certain employee wages and contributions, where the deceased was an employer |
| 4 | Unsecured creditors | Credit cards, overdrafts, utility arrears, care fees, personal loans |
| Last | Beneficiaries | Only from what is left once every debt above has been settled in full |
On a solvent estate this order rarely bites - everything gets paid, so the sequence is academic. On an insolvent one it is unforgiving. An executor who pays the sympathetic creditor first, or who releases something to a beneficiary because it "was obviously meant for them", becomes personally liable to the properly ranked creditors who then go short. Note too that debts do not die with the person: they are paid from the estate, and only the shortfall is written off. Family members are not liable for a deceased relative's debts - unless they were a joint borrower, or unless they are the executor who paid things in the wrong order.
Three executors, three outcomes
Situation: Straightforward-looking estate of about £310,000 - a flat, two bank accounts, a small share portfolio. The will left everything equally to Denise and her brother. Her mother's long-term partner of eleven years was not mentioned at all.
Denise did most of it well. She valued the estate properly, paid the debts she knew about, got the grant in ten weeks and kept clean records. Then, with both beneficiaries asking and nothing apparently outstanding, she distributed the residue four months after the grant - two months inside the conventional window.
Five months after the grant, her mother's partner brought a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, on the basis that he had lived with her as her partner and had been maintained by her. Whatever the merits, the estate no longer held a penny with which to meet it or to fund the negotiation. Denise was left trying to recover money from her brother, who had already used his share to clear a mortgage, while facing a claim she had no fund to answer.
What would have prevented it: waiting the six months. Nothing else. Had she held the residue until then, the claim would have been met from the estate, the beneficiaries would have shared what was left, and Denise's own money would never have been in question. If the beneficiaries had been pressing, an interim payment of part of the residue - retaining a realistic reserve - would have kept everyone reasonably content without exposing her.
Situation: Estate of about £180,000, including a terraced house that stood empty. His brother had been self-employed for thirty years and Raymond had no clear picture of what he might owe.
Raymond's instinct was that he did not know what he did not know - which was exactly the right instinct. Three things followed from it.
He told the insurer immediately that the house was unoccupied and switched to an unoccupied-property policy for the duration, at a cost of a few hundred pounds to the estate. He placed statutory notices in the London Gazette and the local paper, for about £250, and waited out the two-month notice period. And he paid a local firm for two hours on the inheritance tax position, because his brother had made a substantial gift to a nephew about five years before he died and Raymond did not know how it was treated.
A trade creditor he had never heard of surfaced seven weeks after the notice, was paid from the estate as an unsecured debt, and that was that. Raymond distributed at six months and one week, produced estate accounts running to three pages, and heard nothing further. Total cost of the protections: under £900 on a £180,000 estate, all of it borne by the estate rather than by him.
Situation: Priya held her aunt's lasting power of attorney and had managed her finances through three years of dementia. She was also named as sole executor. Her aunt died leaving a small estate, an estranged son, and a long-running family argument about the house.
Priya's first assumption was the common one: that her authority as attorney simply carried on. It did not. The LPA ended at the moment of death, the bank froze the account she had been running for three years, and the direct debits she had been managing were no longer hers to manage.
Her second decision was the good one. Given the estranged son, the disputed house and her own exhaustion, she did not want to administer the estate - so before touching anything, she checked what she could safely do. She arranged the funeral personally and paid for it from her own account (later reclaiming it from the estate as a funeral expense, which is not intermeddling), and she did not pay it from her aunt's frozen account, which would have been.
She then filed a form of renunciation with the probate registry, witnessed independently. Her aunt's son applied instead. Had Priya instead done the natural thing - settled the funeral bill from her aunt's account in the first week - she would have intermeddled, lost the right to renounce, and been locked into administering a contested estate she wanted no part of, with personal liability attached.
A practical order of work
If you are taking the role on, the sequence that causes the least rework is: decide whether to act at all, before touching anything - secure and insure the assets - value everything at the date of death - settle the inheritance tax position - apply for the grant - place the statutory notices while you wait - collect in the assets - pay the debts in order - wait out the six months - distribute - produce the accounts. Everything else is detail hung off that spine.
You do not need a solicitor for it. You may well want one for a single question inside it, and the estates that go wrong are almost never the ones where somebody asked.
Frequently asked questions
- What are the duties of an executor of a will?
- An executor in England and Wales has to: find the will and register the death; secure and insure the estate assets (an empty property usually needs specialist unoccupied-property cover and the insurer must be told); value everything as at the date of death; report and pay any inheritance tax; apply for the grant of probate; collect in the assets; pay the debts in the correct statutory order; settle the deceased's income tax to the date of death and any income the estate earns during administration; distribute to the beneficiaries; and prepare estate accounts for them. The role is not just administrative - an executor holds the estate for the beneficiaries and is personally liable for losses caused by getting it wrong.
- Is an executor personally liable for mistakes?
- Yes. An executor is personally liable for loss caused by a breach of duty, which in practice means the money can come out of your own pocket rather than the estate. The realistic risks are distributing too early and being caught by a later claim, missing a creditor, getting the inheritance tax wrong, paying debts out of the statutory order, or failing to protect an asset - the uninsured empty house being the classic example. This is not a reason to refuse the role: thousands of ordinary people administer estates every year without difficulty. It is a reason to take the four standard protections seriously - statutory notices under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925, waiting six months from the grant before distributing, buying advice on the one or two genuinely technical points, and considering executor insurance on a difficult estate.
- Can I refuse to be an executor of a will?
- Yes, provided you have not already started dealing with the estate. Being named in a will does not oblige you to act. You renounce by signing a form of renunciation (form PA15 in England and Wales) in front of an independent witness and filing it with the probate registry along with the original will. Renunciation is final - you cannot change your mind later. The critical condition is that you must not have "intermeddled": once you have started acting as executor, the right to renounce is generally gone and you would need the court's permission to step back. If you are unsure whether you want the job, do nothing at all with the estate until you have decided.
- What counts as intermeddling in an estate?
- Intermeddling means doing something that only an executor would do - taking on the role in practice, whatever you have or have not signed. Paying the funeral bill from the deceased's bank account, closing or transferring accounts in their name, selling or giving away their possessions, collecting rent, or writing to institutions as the executor will all normally count. Small, obviously protective acts - arranging the funeral personally, securing an empty house, feeding the cat - are usually treated as acts of common humanity or asset protection rather than intermeddling, but the line is not always obvious. If there is any chance you will want to renounce, take advice before touching anything.
- Can an executor be a beneficiary of the will?
- Yes, and it is extremely common - most wills appoint the spouse or the adult children, who are also the main beneficiaries. There is nothing improper about it and it does not affect either your right to inherit or your right to act. The rule people are thinking of applies to witnesses, not executors: under the Wills Act 1837 a witness to the will (or their spouse) cannot benefit under it, and a gift to them fails while the will itself stays valid. So never ask a beneficiary to witness the will - but by all means appoint one as executor.
- Do executors get paid?
- A lay executor can reclaim reasonable out-of-pocket expenses from the estate - the court fee, copies of the grant, statutory notices, travel, postage, valuations, insurance, house clearance - but cannot generally charge for their time unless the will contains a charging clause authorising it. Professional executors (solicitors, banks, trust corporations) are almost always appointed under a will that includes exactly such a clause, which is how they justify charging a percentage of the estate. Keep receipts for every expense you claim: residuary beneficiaries are entitled to see the estate accounts and expenses are the item they query most often.
- How long should an executor wait before distributing the estate?
- The convention is at least six months from the date of the grant. That is the window in which someone can bring a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 - typically a spouse, former spouse, child or cohabitee who says the will did not make reasonable provision for them. An executor who distributes inside that window and is then met with a successful claim may have to fund it personally, because the money has gone. Alongside the six-month wait, statutory advertisements in the London Gazette and a local newspaper - about £200 to £300, with a notice period of at least two months and a day - give protection under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925 against creditors you did not know about. Interim payments to beneficiaries who clearly will not be affected are possible, but that is a judgement call worth taking advice on.
- What can beneficiaries demand from an executor?
- Residuary beneficiaries are entitled to see the estate accounts and to have them explained - what came in, what went out, what expenses were claimed and how the residue was calculated. They are not automatically entitled to a running commentary, and they cannot dictate how you exercise your discretion, but they are entitled to a proper account at the end. If an executor simply fails to act, beneficiaries can apply to the court to compel them, or to have them removed and someone else substituted. Most disputes never get that far: they are caused by silence rather than wrongdoing, and a short written update every couple of months prevents the great majority of them.
- What is the order for paying debts from an estate?
- Funeral and testamentary expenses come first, then secured creditors (a mortgage against the property that secures it), then preferential debts, then unsecured creditors such as credit cards and utility arrears. Beneficiaries are last - they receive only what is left after every debt is settled. Where the estate is solvent and can pay everything, the order rarely bites. Where it is insolvent, it is strict, and an executor who pays a creditor out of turn or pays beneficiaries at all becomes personally liable to the creditors who lose out. If you suspect the estate may not cover its debts, stop distributing and take advice before paying anyone.
- What is the difference between an executor, an administrator and an attorney?
- An executor is named in a will and derives authority from the will itself, confirmed by a grant of probate. An administrator acts where there is no valid will, or where the named executors cannot or will not act, and is appointed under the intestacy rules through a grant of letters of administration - the duties are essentially the same, but the administrator has no authority until the grant is issued. An attorney is different in kind: a lasting power of attorney only operates during the donor's lifetime and ends the moment they die. Holding an LPA gives you no authority whatsoever over the estate, which surprises a great many people who assume the two roles run on from each other. They do not.
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