The grant is no longer the bottleneck: What faster probate turnaround means for the property on the file

There is a story doing the rounds in the Private Client sector at the moment. A Grant of Probate application goes in one week, approval lands the next, and the grant is due within ten working days. It gets shared with a degree of astonishment, as if it might be a fluke.

It isn't a fluke. HMCTS told the Probate Professional User Group in June that average waiting times are now around 4.3 weeks. At the low point in November 2023 the average was 15.8 weeks, and for most of 2023 and 2024 the honest advice to executors was to plan around sixteen weeks and hope. Roughly eight in ten applications now go in digitally, and a clean digital application regularly comes through faster than the average. Paper applications still run to around sixteen weeks, which tells you where the old service level went. The Registry has, by any fair measure, turned the corner.

Two caveats are worth taking seriously before anyone builds a client timeline around a four-week grant.

The fee increase arrived today

From today, 13 July, the probate application fee rises from £300 to £526, an increase of 75%, under the Ministry of Justice's wider revision of court and tribunal fees. The new figure is already showing on the gov.uk fees page this morning. There is one genuine saving buried in the change: copies ordered alongside the application drop from £16 to £2 each, so it is worth deciding at the outset how many the administration will need rather than paying £16 a copy later.

Firms across the country have spent June and early July submitting applications early to beat today's deadline, and HMCTS has already reported caseloads rising since March. We have seen this pattern before. The 2019 fee proposals triggered a surge of applications that pushed processing times out by months. In my view a wobble in the turnaround figures over the summer would not be a surprise, even if the underlying trend holds. Anyone quoting four to five weeks to a client this quarter should attach that caveat.

Stopped applications are still the multiplier

The biggest cause of a long wait was never the queue. It is the stop. HMCTS's own guidance for professional users is blunt about this: a stopped application can take more than twice as long to issue. The common triggers have not changed: a missing original will, valuation figures that do not reconcile with the IHT account, a defective attestation clause, or supporting documents that do not match the application.

The Registry has got faster at processing what is in front of it. It cannot get faster at chasing what is not there. Which means the quality of what goes in, and in particular the quality of the valuation evidence behind the IHT figures, now sets the timeline more than the queue does.

The fix is unglamorous. A date of death valuation that can be defended if the District Valuer asks questions. Chattels evidence that actually supports the IHT407 figure rather than a guess rounded to the nearest thousand. Photographs, dates, methodology and the reasoning on file before the application goes in. I have sat with executors who assumed an estate agent's one-line appraisal would carry the whole IHT400. It will not, and in 2026 the cost of finding that out is measured in months. The same valuation also does double duty later: the date of death figure sets the CGT base cost when the property eventually sells, so a weak number costs the estate twice.

What the sixteen-week wait was quietly covering for

Here is the part of this that I have not seen anyone in the sector say out loud.

For the last few years, the Registry delay did solicitors a quiet favour. Sixteen weeks was miserable for grieving families, but it was also sixteen weeks in which to arrange unoccupied property insurance, get the house cleared, deal with the garden, and line up an agent. Plenty of files used that time badly and got away with it, because the grant was never going to arrive before the property was ready.

At four to five weeks, that cover is gone. If the grant lands in week five and the property is still uninsured, uncleared, unvalued and quietly deteriorating, the estate has gained nothing from the Registry's improvement. The bottleneck has moved from HMCTS to the property. On most estates with a house in them, the property is now the critical path.

The risks on that property never waited for the grant in any case. Insurers routinely impose inspection conditions on unoccupied property from day one. Water systems need draining down before the first cold snap. An empty house is a target from the date of death. We have attended properties in January where the heating had never been drained and the insurer had never been told the house was empty. I wrote about the clocks running on empty probate property in an earlier piece in this series; every one of those clocks starts at death, and none of them care when the grant arrives.

There is a second layer to the insurance point that only shows up at claim time. An unoccupancy condition requiring fortnightly inspections is only worth anything if the inspections happened and can be proved. A claim assessed a year later stands or falls on the inspection log: who attended, when, what they found, what they photographed. A file that cannot answer those questions is a file where the insurer holds all the cards.

Where this leaves the solicitor

The practical shift is in sequencing. The period between instruction and grant used to be long enough that property work could start late and still finish early. It is now short enough that property work started late finishes after the grant, and the file sits there with a grant in hand and a house that cannot be marketed.

Two things protect the timeline at both ends. The first is the valuation evidence, prepared to a standard that keeps the application out of the stopped pile. The second is the property itself: secured and insured from the outset, on an inspection regime documented well enough to satisfy the insurer's conditions if they are ever tested. Clearance and sale preparation belong in parallel with the application rather than after it, so the house is market-ready on the day the grant arrives.

There is an honest objection to starting the property work early, and it is money. Until the grant is issued the estate's cash is usually locked, and executors are understandably reluctant to fund insurance and clearance out of their own pockets. That reluctance was one of the quiet reasons property work waited for the grant, and it was defensible when the grant was four months away. At four weeks the maths has changed. The saving from waiting is a few weeks of carry; the cost is a house that misses the market once the grant is in hand. Commercial terms that defer payment until estate funds are released remove the objection entirely, and any firm instructing property work in 2026 should be asking providers for them.

There is also a client-expectation point that I think firms are underestimating. A faster Registry resets what clients consider normal for the whole administration, HMCTS's share of it and the firm's share alike. The government has publicised the improvement widely, and beneficiaries read the same headlines solicitors do. The firm that used to point at the Registry to explain a slow file has lost its cover story.

A stake in the ground

The estate timeline is no longer set by HMCTS. On any estate with a property in it, the timeline is set by how ready that property is on the day the grant arrives, and readiness is decided in the first fortnight after instruction. A firm still treating the pre-grant period as dead time is handing back to the estate every week the Registry has just saved.

I would be interested to hear from probate solicitors and estate administrators on this. Whether you recognise the sequencing problem from your own files, or whether you have a pre-grant protocol that handles it better than what I have described here. You can find me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

At Prospect PS we put our own staff into the property in the first week and invoice from estate funds on completion, because the grant no longer waits for anyone.