If a loved one has passed away and you have been named as executor of their will, the legal responsibility for administering their estate rests with you, not with a solicitor, the bank, or HMRC, unless you choose to bring one in. That responsibility carries more risk in 2026 than it has in years, and it is worth understanding why before you decide to go it alone.
What does it mean to administer an estate?
Before you can deal with a deceased person's affairs, you will usually need a grant of probate (or letters of administration if there was no will). This grant is your legal authority to settle debts, pay any tax due, and distribute what remains to the beneficiaries named in the will.
Probate is not always required. Where an estate is of low value, or where everything passes automatically to a surviving spouse or civil partner by survivorship, you may be able to bypass the process entirely. But where the deceased held property in their sole name, or had sufficient funds in a bank or investment, a grant will almost always be needed before anything can be sold or transferred.
Why this is harder than it used to be
The inheritance tax threshold has been frozen at £325,000 since 2009 and is set to remain frozen until at least 2030. Property values have risen sharply over that period, which means more estates are being pulled into inheritance tax every year, often ones that would never have expected to pay it a decade ago. Get the valuation wrong, and HMRC can impose penalties of between thirty and seventy percent of the underpaid tax, on top of the tax itself, and can hold up the entire estate while they investigate.
HMRC is also actively looking at whether the deceased held cryptocurrency, NFTs, or other digital assets, and executors and personal representatives are increasingly being asked to account for them. Many people who invested in Bitcoin or other currencies in earlier years did so quietly, and those holdings can be genuinely difficult to locate and value after death. But HMRC treats digital assets as property for tax purposes, and failing to declare them is treated no differently to failing to declare a savings account or a second home. If you are not certain whether the deceased held any form of digital asset, that uncertainty itself is something a solicitor can help you navigate before you submit.
There is also a frustrating bind built into the system itself. Where inheritance tax is due, it generally has to be paid, or a formal arrangement put in place, before the grant of probate is issued. Yet the money to pay it is usually sitting in the very accounts that only the grant can unlock. There are workarounds, including direct payment from the deceased's bank account and instalment options for property, but navigating either without experience tends to mean delay, extra paperwork, or both. Once submitted, applications currently take around eight to sixteen weeks to process, and a straightforward estate typically takes six to twelve months from start to finish. Mistakes along the way only add to that timeline.
Then there is personal liability, which catches out more executors than people realise. If you distribute an estate before properly identifying every debt and giving creditors and unknown beneficiaries the statutory window to come forward, you can be pursued personally for what was paid out, even where you acted entirely in good faith and the money has long since been spent by the people who received it.
A further change is coming that will make this harder still. From April 2027, most unused pension funds and pension death benefits will be brought into the value of an estate for inheritance tax purposes for the first time, under legislation confirmed earlier this year. For executors, that means tracking down pension policies across multiple providers, obtaining valuations, and personally reporting and paying any tax due on the free estate, a burden that has never previously sat with personal representatives. If pensions form part of an estate you are dealing with now, or are likely to in future, this is worth understanding well ahead of time rather than discovering it during the administration itself.
Why it pays to have BSG Solicitors in your corner
None of this means administering an estate yourself is impossible. For very simple, low value estates, it remains entirely manageable. But the margin for error has narrowed, and the cost of getting it wrong lands squarely on the executor, not the estate.
Instructing a solicitor removes that personal exposure. We will identify and properly apply the reliefs available to reduce a tax bill, advise you of the right notices to place at the right time so a creditor or unknown beneficiary cannot return to you months or years later, and keep the application moving through HMRC and the Probate Registry. The cost is also recoverable from the estate itself, so it is rarely a cost you carry personally.
Our Wills and Probate team deals with estates of every size across the country.
Call us on 01524 386500 (Lancaster) or 01772 253841 (Preston).
