The service Northern Ireland doesn't have
GOV.UK puts it in one sentence — you cannot use Tell Us Once if the person was living in Northern Ireland.
In England, Scotland and Wales, the registrar hands over a reference and a single service notifies most of government at once — the department that paid the pension, the tax record, the passport, the driving licence, the council.
Northern Ireland has no equivalent step. It is the only part of the United Kingdom where that is true.
The Bereavement Service for Northern Ireland. It records the date of death, informs any benefit office that was paying the deceased, and checks eligibility for financial support. That is real help, and the entitlement check in particular is easy to miss. But it is benefits-scoped — it is not the cross-government sweep that runs elsewhere, so tax, passport, licence and rates records are each dealt with on their own.
So the list is the work. These are the ones a Northern Ireland family contacts individually — before reaching the private side, which is identical across the UK and which no government service has ever covered anywhere.
HMRC
HM Passport Office
DVLA
Land and Property Services
The Bereavement Service for Northern Ireland
Same words as England, a different office
Northern Ireland keeps the England & Wales vocabulary — it does not use Scotland's confirmation.
A Grant of Probate where there is a will; Letters of Administration where there isn’t. The words a family already half-recognises from English guidance are the right words here.
What changes is where the application goes: the Probate Office in Northern Ireland, at the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast — not an England & Wales registry, and not a Sheriff Court.
Where the deceased left less than £20,000, or where everything was held jointly and passes automatically to the survivor. Above that it depends on what the estate holds — institutions set their own thresholds, so ask the bank or a Northern Ireland solicitor rather than assuming.
A court fee applies where assets are valued at more than £10,000. For a personal application the figure we track is £407 — a £326 court fee plus an £81 personal application fee. Court fees change; confirm the current one with the Probate Office.
Inheritance Tax. It is reserved to Westminster, so the £325,000 nil-rate band and £175,000 residence nil-rate band are identical to England & Wales. Tax and process are separate questions here.
Our own form walkthroughs are England & Wales and do not apply here. That is worth saying plainly rather than implying away — PA1P, the IHT400 series and the rest are not Northern Ireland forms. Even registering the death differs: Northern Ireland uses 36/BD8 where England & Wales uses BD8.
For an estate that straddles the border — where a Northern Irish grant doesn’t reach Republic of Ireland assets and usually means two separate grants — that comparison has its own page: Northern Ireland vs the Republic of Ireland.
What this changes about your records
Same 33 records — but here the contacts layer is standing in for a government service.
Elsewhere in the UK, one step clears a block of government and a family works outward from what’s left. In Northern Ireland there is no block to clear, so the work begins as a list of names — and a list reconstructed from a drawer takes far longer than one written down while someone still knew the answers.
That is the whole argument for writing it down here, and it is a stronger one than the same page could honestly make in Cardiff or Carlisle.
What travels: the records themselves — every institution and department holding a record of the household, named, with the reference the family will be asked for. What doesn't: our England & Wales procedural guidance, which is not written for Northern Ireland and shouldn’t be used as though it were. We prepare records, not applications — the grant stays with a Northern Ireland solicitor.