The Non-Contentious Probate Fees (Amendment) Order 2025, made under the Courts Act 2003 and the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, took effect on 17 November 2025. Its principal provision raised the fee for an official sealed copy of a grant of probate from £1.50 to £16.00 — a 966.67% uplift, justified by the Ministry of Justice as cost-recovery alignment after fifteen years without significant change.
The change attracted minimal press coverage. It is nonetheless, for many estates, the most significant fee change in 2025.
Why sealed copies matter
An official sealed copy of the grant of probate is the document that an executor presents to each institution holding an asset of the estate. The bank, the broker, the share registrar, the foreign authority, the property registrar, the pension administrator — each typically requires its own sealed copy, returned as evidence of the executor's authority to act. Photocopies are not accepted. A single original sealed copy can be passed between institutions in sequence, but the time-cost of passing rather than presenting in parallel is rarely worth it for an estate with several institutional asset holders.
An estate with, say, three bank accounts, two brokerage accounts, two share registrars, a pension scheme, and a foreign asset will typically require nine sealed copies. At the old fee, this was £13.50. At the new fee, it is £144.00. For a complex estate with twenty institutional holders, the figure exceeds £300. Neither sum is catastrophic. Neither sum is trivial. Neither sum was anticipated by most families assembling their executor budget on the basis of pre-2025 figures.
What the uplift is for
The Ministry of Justice's published rationale, in the explanatory memorandum accompanying the Order, is that the £1.50 fee had been unchanged since 2009 and no longer reflected the cost to the registry of producing each sealed copy. The new fee is, the memorandum states, a cost-recovery figure rather than a revenue-generating one. Industry analysts queried the cost basis, given that the marginal cost of producing an additional sealed copy of an electronic document already issued in original form is plainly low. The Ministry's response was that the cost figure includes a proportionate allocation of the registry's overheads and not just the marginal printing cost.
Whether the resulting figure represents genuine cost recovery, or a cost-recovery argument used to recover more than cost, is the kind of question the courts have addressed before in the context of fee structures. For now, no challenge to the uplift has been lodged.
What an executor should now do
Two adjustments. First, when applying for the grant of probate, order all anticipated sealed copies in the same application — the additional cost of ordering twelve copies at the point of application is the same as the cost of ordering one and ordering eleven more later, and the postage and administrative time of subsequent orders is avoided. Second, when budgeting executor disbursements for a complex estate, add a line for sealed-copy fees and size it generously. Under the old regime, this line was a rounding error. Under the new, it is not.
July 2026 update — concurrent sealed copies
The fee for sealed copies ordered concurrently with the grant application is £2.00 per copy. Copies ordered separately after the grant has been issued remain at £1.50. The November 2025 uplift to £16 is superseded for concurrent orders. Executors should order all anticipated sealed copies at the same time as the grant application.