In 2017, and again in 2019, the government proposed that the fee for applying for a grant of probate should be banded against the value of the estate. At the top end, the fee would have been £6,000 — a number, the Ministry of Justice was at pains to point out, that nonetheless represented less than half a per cent of the estates concerned.
Both proposals were withdrawn. The argument that defeated them was not that the fee was too high in absolute terms. It was that a fee for a service is meant to recover the cost of providing the service, and that anything beyond cost-recovery is, by definition, a tax. The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments reported in 2019 that the proposed fee was 'in the nature of a tax, not a fee', and the Statutory Instruments Act did not provide the authority to impose it without primary legislation. The Ministry conceded the point.
What replaced the proposal
In May 2024, a far more modest reform took effect. The single-tier fee rose from £273 to £300 for all estates above £5,000. Estates below £5,000 pay nothing. The reform was justified on cost-recovery grounds and passed without controversy. The political appetite for treating the probate registry as a revenue stream had visibly departed.
Note: the probate application fee is £526.
It is worth keeping the history in mind when reading current coverage of probate costs. The court fee is a small fraction of the bill for any non-trivial estate. The argument about whether it should be larger has been had twice, in living memory, and resolved against the larger number.
The fee that arrived instead
What changed in November 2025 was less visible and more consequential: the fee for an official sealed copy of the grant of probate rose from £1.50 to £16.00 — a ten-fold uplift presented as inflationary catch-up but, in practice, a meaningful charge against estates with many institutional asset holders. An estate with twelve banks and brokers, all requiring sealed copies, saw its disbursement bill rise from £18 to £192 overnight.
Whether that, too, constitutes a tax in the nature of a fee is the kind of question lawyers find more interesting than journalists. The answer, for now, appears to be that nobody is challenging it.
July 2026 note: the concurrent sealed-copy fee is £2.00 per copy. The £16 regime lasted seven months.