Selling a Probate Property: What It Costs, and the Order You Have to Do It In

Selling a probate house worth £290,000 costs the estate roughly £8,400 to £10,300. Selling the same house in an ordinary sale would cost about £5,000 before removals, on the HomeOwners Alliance's 2026 figures. The gap is everything you have to carry as executor on top of a normal sale: the valuation, the title work, the clearance, the insurance on an empty house, and the months when nobody lives in it.

Cost is rarely what stops your sale, though. The order of operations is. You cannot complete without the grant. You may not be able to sign on your own. And the inheritance tax normally falls due before the grant that would release the house to pay it. The tax of an inherited house is covered in depth elsewhere on this site, so you get a link rather than a repeat.

Selling a probate property, at a glance

• Total cost to the estate: about £8,400 to £10,300 on a £290,000 sale, against about £5,000 if you were selling the same house normally.
• Agent commission: the HomeOwners Alliance puts the 2026 average sole agency fee at 1.42% including VAT, which is about £4,100 on a £290,000 house.
• Conveyancing: £610 to £950 on the same source, and more if you are selling a leasehold flat.
• Establishing the estate's title: HMRC will accept 1% of the probate value of what you sell where the estate is over £90,000 and up to £400,000, or your actual costs if they come to more.
• Before the grant: gov.uk tells you not to market at all. Agents and probate solicitors do it anyway and disclose it. Either way you cannot complete.
• Who signs: every personal representative named on your grant, or a court order.
• The gain: only the movement since the date of death is taxed, and your selling costs come off it.

Do you need probate to sell, and can you market before the grant?

You need the grant to complete, and nothing gets you round it. Until it is issued you hold no document proving you can transfer the house, so the buyer's conveyancer will not let their client complete and your transfer cannot be registered.

Marketing is the part everybody argues about. gov.uk is blunt in its own guidance on applying for probate: "You should not make any financial plans or put property on the market until you've got probate." Your agent will tell you different, because agents and probate solicitors market probate houses before the grant all the time and disclose it in the listing. Neither position is a legal rule. No statute bans a pre-grant sale and none permits one. The block is practical.

So here is the honest answer. Marketing early buys you time, and plenty of executors do it. It also costs you something. Your buyer waits on a date you cannot promise, their mortgage offer runs down, and some of them walk. If you go early, three things protect you. Tell every viewer in writing that the grant is outstanding. Keep your agent's tie-in short, because you may need to change your mind. And do not let anyone push you into exchanging before the grant lands, because then the promise you cannot keep becomes your problem rather than theirs.

Everything short of completion is fair game. You can value the house, clear it, insure it, gather the paperwork and take an offer. What you cannot do is hand over the keys.

Who owns the house, and who has to sign?

From the moment of death the house belongs to the personal representatives, the collective name for executors under a will and administrators where there is none. It does not belong to the beneficiaries. A son who has been left the family home does not own it and cannot sell it until you transfer it to him, which is where our guide to inheriting a house in the UK begins.

Then comes the rule that is the commonest reason a probate sale collapses. Where there is more than one personal representative, a contract to sell the house needs every one of them to join in, and so does the transfer. Not a majority. All of you, or a court order. One signature short and you have no sale, however far down the road you are.

One exception rescues more sales than anything else here. Where the grant was issued to only some of the executors named in the will, those who took it can sell on their own, and the sale is as good as if everybody had signed. So the document that tells you who signs is your grant, not the will.

Before you instruct an agent, read the grant, list the names on it, and check that every one of them will sign when you need them. Ten minutes now saves the sale that falls over at exchange.

What is the order of operations from death to completion?

Nine stages, and you mostly have to take them in this order. If the house is let, run them alongside the executor's step by step guide, which covers the tenancy through the administration period.

• 1. Value the house at the date of death. Everything downstream uses that figure, including your inheritance tax and your gain.
• 2. Decide who sells it. The estate can sell, or you can transfer the house to the beneficiaries and let them sell. Settle it before you list, because it decides whose name goes on the contract; the tax side of that choice is worked through on our page on capital gains tax on an inherited property.
• 3. Work out the inheritance tax and start paying it. This is the stage that catches people out, and it is the next section.
• 4. Apply for the grant. The tax comes first, which is why stage 3 sits where it does.
• 5. Market the house, or earlier, with the caveats above.
• 6. Accept an offer and let the buyer's survey and searches run.
• 7. Exchange contracts once the grant is in your hands.
• 8. Complete and hand over the keys.
• 9. Report the gain if you have one, settle the tax, then distribute.

Three of those stall far more often than the rest. Stage 4 is the one that takes the longest by a distance, and you will find the timings on our guide to how long probate takes in the UK. Stage 2 stalls when your beneficiaries disagree with each other. Stage 7 stalls when a personal representative you had not spoken to in a while turns out to be on the grant.

The good news is that stages 5 to 8 usually run faster for you than an ordinary sale. You are chain free, you have nothing to buy, and buyers pay for that.

What if a co-executor will not act, cannot be found, or has died?

If your reluctant executor has not yet taken the grant, you have a clean answer. They step back and let the rest of you take it. Once the grant names only the executors who acted, those of you on it can sell without them, and your buyer gets good title. Sort it at the very start, because an unwilling, unwell, absent or uncontactable executor is far easier to handle before the grant than after.

If they took the grant alongside you and then refuse to sign, you are somewhere else entirely. You need their signature or a court order, and there is no shortcut. Find out why first. A co-executor who thinks your price is too low, or who wants the house themselves, is a negotiation. One who has stopped answering is a legal problem, and the sooner you hand it to the probate solicitor the cheaper it stays.

If a co-executor dies, whether they had already taken the grant changes who can sign, so get that confirmed before you list rather than after you accept an offer.

How do you pay the Inheritance Tax when the money is in the house?

This is the trap that makes your whole sequence feel back to front, and gov.uk states it without apology: "You'll normally have to start paying Inheritance Tax before probate is granted." The grant releases the house. The house pays the tax. The tax comes first.

Three things get you through it. The tax on the house itself can usually be spread over ten annual instalments instead of being paid in one go, the route most property-heavy estates take. The deceased's own bank and building society accounts can often release money straight to HMRC before your grant arrives. Where neither covers it, executors do borrow against the estate, though it is expensive and you cannot set the interest against the gain later.

Plan for one thing. When you sell, the instalments still outstanding on the house fall due, so hold that money back out of your proceeds instead of paying everything out to the beneficiaries. Our guide to how long probate takes sets out how the instalment route runs alongside your application.

What valuation do you need at the date of death, and who should do it?

You need an open market value as at the date of death, and that single figure does two jobs for you. It sets what the estate is worth for inheritance tax, and it becomes the estate's starting cost for capital gains tax, which is why selling soon after death usually produces very little gain. The mechanics of that starting cost sit on our page on the probate base cost for capital gains tax.

For a modest estate with an ordinary house, a written appraisal from an estate agent is often enough, and most will do it free. Pay a qualified surveyor for a written open market valuation where the estate actually pays inheritance tax, where the house is unusual or hard to compare, or where you expect a beneficiary to question your number. That figure has to survive scrutiny for years.

Two cost points. A valuation you need in order to work out the gain comes off the gain. The wider cost of establishing the estate's title is handled separately, on HMRC's scale or on what you actually spend.

One trap worth naming. If you sell within three years of the death for less than the probate value, the estate may be able to reclaim inheritance tax on the difference. Making that claim also resets the starting cost for capital gains tax to your sale price, so the loss you were expecting to bank disappears. Take advice before you claim, and the full mechanics are on capital gains tax on an inherited property.

Agent, auction or cash buyer, and what do you owe the beneficiaries?

An agent normally gets you the higher price and the slower, less certain sale. Auction gets you a binding sale on the day the hammer falls and a fixed completion date, at a price that reflects that certainty. A cash-buying company gets you speed, and prices that speed into the offer.

Your running costs decide which of those is right, and executors routinely underestimate them. An empty house costs you insurance, council tax once any exemption ends, standing charges, garden maintenance and the slow deterioration of a place nobody heats. Work out what a month of waiting costs before you turn down a lower offer that completes quickly. For the auction route priced properly, see our guide to selling a house at auction, and if you are weighing up doing it without an agent at all, see selling a house without an estate agent.

Worth knowing when a cash buyer approaches you. A company that buys houses as trading stock can claim a stamp duty relief on a purchase from personal representatives that an ordinary buyer never gets. It applies where the person who died lived there in the two years before their death, and it is lost if the company overspends on doing the house up, lets it out, or moves anybody connected with the business in. That relief is part of why the model works on probate stock. It is never yours, but it is worth knowing when they explain how thin their margin is. Our page on stamp duty relief for probate properties covers it, and stamp duty on probate property transfers covers what happens when a beneficiary buys the others out.

On what you owe the beneficiaries: you are selling somebody else's inheritance and you should expect to justify your price. The highest number does not always win. Keeping the evidence does. Two or three marketing appraisals, what your agent advised, every offer you received, and a short note of why you took the one you did. Beneficiaries who are shown that file rarely argue with it.

What does selling a probate property cost, and what comes off the gain?

Here is your whole bill on a £290,000 sale. The agent and conveyancing figures are the 2026 averages published by the HomeOwners Alliance, and our guide to what estate agents charge to sell a house breaks the commission down. House clearance, the valuation and the empty-house insurance vary more than anything else here, because they turn on what is in the house and how long it stands empty. Get quotes for those three.

Cost	Typical cost on a £290,000 sale	Does it come off the gain?
Estate agent commission	£4,118 at 1.42% including VAT	Yes
Conveyancing for the sale	£610 to £950	Yes
Energy performance certificate	£35 to £120	Usually, as part of the cost of marketing
Date-of-death valuation	£250 to £600	Yes, where you need the figure to work out the gain
Establishing the estate's title	£2,900 on HMRC's scale, or your actual costs	Yes, as a separate category from the selling costs
House clearance	£300 to £1,200	No
Insurance on the empty house, six months	£150 to £400	No
Council tax once any exemption ends	Ask the council about the exemption for a property left empty after a death	No
Total	about £8,400 to £10,300

The estate cannot reclaim VAT, so every figure that comes off your gain is the fee including VAT. That is worth a few hundred pounds and executors miss it constantly. The certificate is the one soft edge in that list: it is usually accepted as part of the cost of marketing the property, though HMRC's own list does not name it.

The fifth line is the one an ordinary seller never meets. You can claim the cost of establishing the estate's title to what you sell, HMRC publishes a scale for it and will accept either the scale or your actual costs, whichever suits you. For deaths from 6 April 2004 onwards, the scale in HMRC's Statement of Practice 2 (2004) runs like this.

Gross value of the estate	What HMRC will accept
Not more than £50,000	1.8% of the probate value of what you sell
Over £50,000, up to £90,000	£900, split across the estate's assets in proportion to their probate values
Over £90,000, up to £400,000	1% of the probate value of what you sell
Over £400,000, up to £500,000	£4,000, split as above
Over £500,000, up to £1,000,000	0.8% of the probate value of what you sell
Over £1,000,000, up to £5,000,000	£8,000, split as above
Over £5,000,000	0.16% of the probate value of what you sell, capped at £10,000

Run both numbers before you choose. On a single-property estate your actual conveyancing and title costs often beat the scale, and on a larger estate the scale usually wins.

Now the costs that do not come off, because this is where probate returns go wrong most often. House clearance, insurance while the house stands empty, utilities, council tax, removals, storage, cleaning, cosmetic tidying before the photographs, and interest on money you borrowed. None of it reduces your gain. Real cost to the estate, no tax relief.

Do the executors pay capital gains tax, and who reports it?

The estate is taxed only on what the house has done since the date of death, and your selling costs come off that thin slice. That is why so many probate sales leave nothing to pay.

Take the £290,000 house, sold fourteen months later for £298,000. Your uplift is £8,000. Against it: £4,232 of agent commission at 1.42% including VAT, £780 of conveyancing mid-range, £80 for the certificate, and £2,900 for establishing title on the scale, because a £340,000 estate sits in the 1% band. That is £7,992 of allowable cost against an £8,000 uplift. Eight pounds of gain, nothing to pay, and no 60 day return for the estate.

Where a gain does survive your costs, three things decide the bill. Personal representatives pay 24% on residential gains for a 2026/27 sale, per gov.uk's rates page. The estate has its own annual allowance for the year of death and the two tax years after it. And you have 60 days from completion to report and pay, which our guide to capital gains tax payment deadlines walks through. One timing quirk: your tax year is fixed by exchange, not completion, so a March exchange with a June completion lands in the earlier year while the 60 day clock still starts at completion.

Before you accept an offer, run the estate's numbers through the cost of selling calculator. It returns the total selling cost and what is left for the beneficiaries in under a minute, whether the estate is selling or the beneficiaries are. For every cost in any sale, probate or not, start at our guide to the cost of selling a property.