Estate admin · Leasehold accounts

None of the managing agents checked publishes an answer, and the one body that states the law says both charges carry on against the estate.

The debt does not stop because the person did. The Leasehold Advisory Service, funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, puts it in one sentence: the service charge debt is owed by the estate of the deceased leaseholder, so any claim for service charges or ground rent has to be presented to the executors. There is no moment at which a managing agent needs a document in order to switch anything off, because from its side nothing switches off. The account carries on and the person it is claimed from changes.

The processes managing agents do publish are triggered by a transfer, not a death. FirstPort's closest published procedures are a legal representative asking for a Land Registry RX4 restriction to be removed, or a Deed of Variation, and both sit on its sale-or-transfer pages. Rendall & Rittner's 16-question resident FAQ covers selling and remortgaging but not death. The paperwork these agents describe is the paperwork of a flat changing hands, which for an estate may be months away.

Where a landlord does publish a death-certificate rule, it is attached to something that ends. Places for People asks for a copy of the death certificate to begin the process of ending a rented tenancy, and its moving-out page says rent continues until all keys are handed in. A tenancy has an end point that a document can start. Its homeowner and leaseholder pages, all 111 of its help-support pages checked, contain no equivalent, because no page describes an equivalent end point for a leasehold account.

A channel is not a policy. FirstPort's web enquiry form offers a further-details option of Notification of bereavement, embedded on four of its help pages, and a site search for bereavement returns nothing else. That option tells FirstPort someone has died. It does not tell the person filling it in what FirstPort will accept, what it will do with the account, or what the estate should expect next.

• Check the name printed on the service charge demand or the portal login before contacting anyone. FirstPort and Mainstay are now one help centre; Places for People is a separate organisation. A query sent to the wrong one does not reach the other.
• Notify the agent in writing and ask, in the same letter, what document it needs and what happens to the account. No provider checked publishes either answer, so the agent's own written reply is the only record you will have of what it agreed to. Keep it.
• Treat both the service charge and the ground rent as continuing estate debts from the date of death. The Leasehold Advisory Service states that both are owed by the estate and claimed against the executors. Nothing published by any agent pauses either one.
• If the building was managed by Mainstay, contact FirstPort directly. Mainstay joined forces with FirstPort in 2020 and its resident pages were taken down; on 6 September 2026 mainstaygroup.co.uk redirects to a FirstPort page that returns Page Not Found. There is no separate Mainstay bereavement process to find.
• If the block is run by a right-to-manage company, ask its directors what they need rather than looking for a written policy. Neither LEASE nor any RTM company checked publishes one. The Leasehold Advisory Service's position applies to any leasehold block, RTM-run blocks included.

Seven sources were checked on 6 September 2026: four managing agents, one housing association, the sector trade body and the government-funded advice service. Look for the column that is almost entirely Not stated, and for the one row where a death certificate is named and read what it is attached to.

7 checked · 5 publish nothing at all on this question — that row is kept deliberately, because the silence is the finding. Each row is what that provider’s own page says, on the date beside it.

A service charge demand addressed to someone who has died is one of the running household accounts an executor has to find, notify and keep paying from the estate, alongside council tax, utilities and the mortgage. The blank executor checklist at /resources/blank-executor-checklist is free and is a place to list every account that keeps running, this one included.

Because no agent publishes what it accepts, the written exchange you have with it becomes the evidence that you notified them and on what date. The executor evidence log at /library/executor-evidence-log is built for keeping exactly that kind of correspondence in date order.

Whether a continuing service charge is paid ahead of, alongside, or after other estate debts is a question of priority that this page does not settle. The estate debts priority guide at /library/estate-debts-priority-guide covers the order.

What usually comes next.

Where this sits in the wider work.

Informational, not advice. This page is a snapshot of what seven sources had published as at 6 September 2026, and it goes stale the moment any managing agent adds a bereavement page. Reconfirm against firstport.co.uk's help-support sitemap (69 URLs on that date, none death-related) and whether firstport.co.uk/mainstay-residents/ has been reinstated; rendallandrittner.co.uk/resident-support/; all of placesforpeople.co.uk's /help-support/ pages by body text, not by URL, since the tenancy rule lives in the body of ending-your-tenancy; Savills' residential property management page; The Property Institute's leaseholder rights summary, dated February 2024; and lease-advice.org's family-members FAQ, which returned a Cloudflare 403 to every automated request and was verified against the Internet Archive capture of 15 October 2024, page last modified 6 January 2023. England and Wales long-leasehold flats only, managed either by a professional managing agent instructed by the freeholder or by a right-to-manage company. Scotland's factoring regime and Northern Ireland leasehold law differ and are out of scope, as are retirement and park-home agreements. The Places for People rule quoted applies to rented tenancies and is included to show the contrast, not as a leasehold rule.