Probate and possessions: what has to wait

What probate actually is

Probate is the legal right to deal with somebody’s estate: their property, money and possessions. Where there is a will, the executors named in it apply for a grant of probate. Where there is not, the closest living relative applies for letters of administration.

Until the grant is issued, nobody has formal authority to deal with the estate’s assets. That is the whole reason this question exists.

When you do not need it

Probate is not always required. It may not be needed where the person:

• had only savings
• owned money or shares jointly with somebody else, which passes automatically to the survivor
• held land or property as joint tenants, which also passes automatically

Banks and other institutions set their own thresholds, so a small estate held entirely in one account may be released without a grant. Ask each institution directly rather than assuming.

If probate is not needed, most of the caution below relaxes. The valuation questions do not, if inheritance tax is in play.

What you can do before the grant

More than most people think.

There is no rule that a house must sit untouched until a grant arrives. You can go in, you can sort, you can clean, and you can dispose of ordinary items with no meaningful resale value. Old food, toiletries, worn clothing, broken furniture, and the accumulated paper of a long life are not estate assets in any practical sense and nobody expects them to be inventoried.

You can also, and should, secure the property, keep the insurance current, and take out anything valuable or irreplaceable for safekeeping.

What has to wait

The line is about value and about authority, not about tidiness.

Do not sell anything of value. Until the grant is issued you do not have authority to dispose of estate assets. Selling first and accounting later is where executors get into difficulty.

Do not put the property on the market. GOV.UK’s own guidance is direct about this: you should not make financial plans or market the property until you have probate.

Do not empty the house. A full clearance before anything has been valued removes the evidence of what the estate contained. If HMRC later asks what was in it, photographs and a firm’s collection note are a much weaker answer than an inventory would have been.

Do not dispose of anything specifically left to somebody. A will that leaves a named item to a named person creates a specific bequest. If that item has gone, the executor has a problem that is theirs personally.

Be careful with anything that might be worth more than £1,500. See below.

How household goods are valued

For inheritance tax, the estate is valued as at the date of death, and household and personal goods are reported on form IHT407 alongside the main IHT400 return.

The threshold that matters in practice is £1,500:

For the estimate, the test is open market value: what you would have got if you had sold it. What similar items actually fetch on an online marketplace is acceptable evidence. HMRC’s own manual notes that a sale after death, particularly at auction, is usually the best evidence of value.

Which produces a genuinely useful piece of advice. If you are unsure whether something crosses the line, selling it properly at auction and recording what it made is often a cleaner answer than guessing, provided you have authority to sell it.

The categories to look twice at are jewellery, watches, antique furniture, paintings and prints, musical instruments, cameras, tools, militaria and anything collected deliberately over decades. A house that looks like ordinary furniture can contain two items that are not.

Where the executor stands

This is the part worth being plain about.

An executor is personally liable for administering the estate properly. If assets are disposed of below value, or a specific bequest goes missing, or the estate is undervalued for tax, the consequences land on the executor rather than on the estate.

That is not a reason to be paralysed. It is a reason to do three cheap things:

1. Photograph everything before it moves. Twenty minutes, and it is the record you will wish you had.
2. Get a valuation before a clearance, not after. Many auctioneers will walk a house for a modest fee or free in the hope of the sale, and their opinion on what crosses the £1,500 line is worth having.
3. Keep the paperwork. What went where, when, and to whom. If a clearance firm takes the residue, ask for a note of it and check their registration before they do.

None of this requires a solicitor for a straightforward estate. It requires the order of operations to be valuation, then authority, then clearance, rather than the reverse.