What the Trust Registration Service actually requires
Registration is a money-laundering control, not a tax return — most trusts must register whether or not they owe HMRC anything. The legal basis is Schedule 3A of the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017. GOV.UK's own guidance states the general rule plainly: all UK resident express trusts must register “unless they are excluded from registration as a Schedule 3A trust.”
A trust liable to UK tax must always register, regardless of any exclusion. Capital Gains Tax, Income Tax, Inheritance Tax, Stamp Duty Land Tax, and the Scottish and Welsh land taxes all trigger the duty on their own — no exclusion, including the one this page is about, survives a genuine UK tax liability arising.
Schedule 3A carries a specific exclusion for trusts arising from a death.
Not every trust is a lifetime arrangement someone set up deliberately. Administering an estate itself routinely creates a trust — the executors hold estate assets on trust for the beneficiaries until everything is distributed — and Parliament built an exclusion around exactly that, so a straightforward administration is not swept into a registration regime aimed at concealment and lifetime planning. §II is that exclusion, in HMRC's own words.
This page is scoped narrowly. It does not attempt the general question of whether a lifetime trust needs to register — that question has its own, more familiar rules. It is about the one exclusion that specifically touches an estate, and the point at which it stops applying.
The 2-year exclusion for trusts arising from a death
Two provisions carry the exclusion — but they are not the same age. One covers a trust created directly by a will; the other covers a trust created by a deed of variation of that same estate. The will-trust exclusion has been in force since Schedule 3A itself was created in October 2020.
The deed-of-variation exclusion is new — it was inserted by the same June 2026 SI covered in §VI, and only took effect on 30 June 2026. Once in force, both run the two years from the date of death, not from when the trust document itself was signed.
Before 30 June 2026, Schedule 3A carried no equivalent exclusion for a deed-of-variation trust at all. For a death, or a deed made, before that date, a trust created by a deed of variation had no specific Schedule 3A carve-out to rely on — it needed a different exclusion, or it was registrable in its own right rather than sheltering under the same two-year window the will-trust exclusion has always given.
HMRC's own manual illustrates the deed-of-variation version with a worked example. Martha inherits her mother Caroline's estate, then signs a deed of variation directing part of it into a trust for her sisters and their children. That trust is excluded from registration until two years from Caroline's death — not two years from the date Martha signed the deed.
If the trust is still holding assets when that anniversary arrives, it has to register.
Read that last sentence again if you're mid-way through a deed of variation. A deed signed close to the two-year mark can leave a newly-created trust with very little runway before it has to register — see the deed of variation page for the separate two-year deadline that applies to making the deed at all; that clock and this one both start at the same death, but govern different things.
When the exclusion lapses — HMRC's own example
The exclusion is about whether the trust keeps running — but "running from when" is not always the same answer. A perfectly ordinary will can create a trust that outlives the two-year window without anyone treating it as unusual — a life interest for a surviving spouse is the single most common shape this takes.
HMRC's own worked example uses exactly that will, and, in the same example, shows a second trust from the very same estate that is tested from a completely different date.
HMRC's worked example, point 1 (TRSM23021) — the trust that commences at death.
“George dies in England on 4 August 2022. His will appoints Harry as his executor and leaves £500,000 on trust for his husband Jerry, during his lifetime, and then for his son Philip.”
HMRC's own conclusion: “The trust of the legacy commences from death and, if still in existence two years from the date of death, it will need to be registered on TRS.”
Nothing about this will is exotic — a life interest for a spouse, then to a child, is one of the most ordinary structures a solicitor drafts. That ordinariness is exactly why the trap catches people: nobody tells Harry, as executor, that he has quietly become a trustee with a registration duty on the horizon.
The same example, point 2 — a trust that doesn't commence at death at all.
George's own residuary estate — the rest of what he owned, left to different beneficiaries — does not create a trust the moment he dies. HMRC's manual is explicit that this trust “is not in existence” until the executors actually assent the residue to themselves as trustees, or the administration period otherwise ends.
In HMRC's own example that assent happened on 16 December 2025 — over three years after George's death — and HMRC's own words fix the clock from that date instead: the residuary trust “would therefore need to be registered after 16 December 2025.”
Two trusts, created by the same will, tested from two different start dates.
The rule is consistent; the trigger date is what varies. Any express trust a will creates — a spouse's life interest, a trust for children who haven't reached a vesting age, one for a disabled beneficiary, or one created afterwards by a deed of variation — has to register once it is still holding property and the relevant clock has run out.
For a trust that commences at death, like Jerry and Philip's legacy trust, that clock is the two-year anniversary of death. For a trust that doesn't commence until later — most often a residuary trust, which only exists once assets are actually appropriated to the trustees, or the estate's administration ends — the clock runs from that later date instead.
If the trust in question is genuinely wound up before its own applicable date, it never has to register at all.
HMRC's manual separately flags that a will trust's TRS status is not the only thing to check: an estate can independently trigger "complex estate" Income Tax reporting requirements, which is a different question with its own rules (TRSM27030) and outside the scope of this page.
The deadlines, in one place
Six different clocks apply depending on what kind of trust it is, when it was created, and what it holds. Only the final three rows are specific to this page's own subject: a will/deed-of-variation trust outliving its exclusion, the Capital Gains Tax deadline that trust can trigger without warning if it sells a property, and the one-off deadline the June 2026 SI created (§VI).
The rest are the general TRS deadline rules that apply to any registrable trust.
| Trust | Deadline | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Any non-taxable registrable trust The general rule, in force since 6 October 2020, for any trust that has to register but has no UK tax to pay — the 1 September 2022 backstop covers trusts that already existed when the rule began. | 90 days of becoming registrable, or 1 September 2022, whichever is later | TRSM40010 + GOV.UK: register a trust as a trustee |
| Taxable trust created on or after 6 April 2021 The trigger is the tax liability arising, not the trust's creation date. | 90 days of the trustees becoming liable to tax, or 1 September 2022, whichever is later | TRSM40010 |
| Taxable trust created before 6 April 2021 The older, self-assessment-aligned deadlines, still live for pre-2021 trusts. | 31 January after the relevant tax year — or 5 October after the tax year of a first Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax liability | TRSM40030 |
| A will trust or deed-of-variation trust whose 2-year exclusion has just lapsed Two different start dates, both HMRC's own, read together with the general 90-day rule — not a single quoted sentence. See the note directly under the table. | Becomes registrable once still holding property at the 2-year anniversary of death — or, for a later-commencing trust (e.g. a trust of the residuary estate), from whenever it actually begins — then the ordinary 90-day non-taxable rule runs from that date | TRSM23020 / TRSM23021 + TRSM40010 |
| A trust that sells UK residential property and owes Capital Gains Tax Exactly the scenario of a will trust selling the deceased's home. If more than one deadline could apply to the same trust, HMRC says register by the earlier of the two. | 60 days of the sale — and it must register as a taxable trust before it can even submit the CGT on UK property return | TRSM40010 |
| A non-UK trust newly caught by the pre-October-2020 UK land rule (SI 2026/621) The June 2026 amendment's own extended deadline (§VI) for a non-UK express trust that acquired UK land before 6 October 2020 and still held it when the SI took effect. | 1 September 2027 | SI 2026/621 |
Honesty about the will-trust row.
HMRC's manual does not state “two years plus 90 days” as a single figure anywhere, and the two-year trigger itself is not always the same date.
What it states, in two separate places, is: a continuing trust that commences at death becomes registrable at the two-year anniversary of death, while a trust that commences later — a residuary trust, most often — is tested from whenever it actually begins instead (TRSM23020/TRSM23021, see §III); and separately, a non-taxable trust must register within 90 days of becoming registrable (TRSM40010).
Put those together and the effective long-stop for a death-commencing will trust is two years and 90 days from death — but that combined figure is this page's own reading of the manual, not a sentence HMRC states directly, and it's worth confirming with an adviser rather than treating it as an official published figure.
A trust selling the deceased's home can also trigger the separate 60-day CGT deadline in the row below — register by whichever deadline falls first.
Who has to register, and what happens if nobody does
The legal duty sits with the trustees — which, for a will trust, is usually the executors, now wearing a different hat. GOV.UK is direct about this: “All trustees are equally legally responsible for the trust, but trustees must nominate one 'lead trustee' to be the main point of contact for HMRC.”
For a will trust, the people appointed as executors typically become the first trustees the moment the trust arises — so it is very often the same people, doing the same job, under a legal label the will never used and the probate process never announces.
The fixed penalty
The stated policy comes first
A starker front door, same policy
The June 2026 change — and why it's only half the source of this trap
A real regulatory change — narrower in scope than it sounds
A genuine amendment to the Money Laundering Regulations did take effect on 30 June 2026. SI 2026/621 — the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Amendment) Regulations 2026 — was made on 9 June 2026 and came into force on 30 June 2026. It amends Schedule 3A itself, confirmed directly against legislation.gov.uk, which lists “Amendment of Schedule 3A (excluded trusts)” among the regulations it makes.
Mainly aimed at non-UK trusts holding UK land
Its central target is non-UK express trusts that acquired an interest in UK land before 6 October 2020 and still held it on 30 June 2026 — previously excluded, now brought into registration, with an extended deadline of 1 September 2027 (SI 2026/621, reg 26).
A new low-value exclusion — with a £2,000 cap that actually binds
Sch 3A(23A) MLR 2017 excludes a trust holding no UK land, never over £10,000 cumulatively, no income over £5,000 a year, no UK tax liability — and no assets of appreciable worth over £2,000 in total, the tightest limit of the five and the one most likely to bite in practice. It applies to only one trust per settlor — a settlor with two qualifying trusts only gets the exclusion on one. Two further new provisions, Sch 3A(1A) and Sch 3A(9A), give a trust a two-year reprieve where it loses its excluded status solely because a trustee died. A separate exclusion covers Scottish survivorship destination trusts.
Half old law, half brand new
The will-trust exclusion, Sch 3A(7) MLR 2017, has applied since Schedule 3A was created in October 2020 — this SI left it untouched. The deed-of-variation exclusion, Sch 3A(8A) MLR 2017, is the opposite: this very SI inserted it, with effect from 30 June 2026. Before that date, Schedule 3A carried no equivalent carve-out for a deed-of-variation trust at all — see §II.
Sourcing note, stated plainly: this pass fetched SI 2026/621 in full — legislation.gov.uk returns the whole instrument, including regulation 35's Schedule 3A insertions (regs 35(2)-(5)) and regulation 26(4)/(5)'s registration deadlines, in a single request.
The breakdown above — the pre-2020 UK land rule and its 1 September 2027deadline, Sch 3A(23A) MLR 2017's exact limits and one-trust-per-settlor cap, the trustee-death reprieves, and the Scottish carve-out — is drawn directly from that primary source, cross-checked against GOV.UK's own plain-English guidance at gov.uk/guidance/check-if-you-need-to-register-a-trust, not a secondary summary.
The dating in the third card is confirmed against legislation.gov.uk's own amendment annotations on Schedule 3A itself, which record para 7's insertion (6 October 2020, by SI 2020/991) and para 8A's (30 June 2026, by this SI) separately.
Know within the first hour whether the will you're administering creates a trust that will outlive the exclusion
Includes the full estate structure read-through, the nil-rate band position, and a timed action plan — so a life interest, a discretionary trust, or an unfinished deed of variation gets flagged in the first hour, not two years from now when the registration clock has already run.
See what's included→Common questions
Checked directly against GOV.UK, the HMRC Trust Registration Service Manual, and legislation.gov.uk on 30 August 2026. This page is information about how the rules work, not advice on your situation — for a will trust that may be registrable, take advice from a solicitor or accountant before relying on any deadline stated here.
Three ways to act on this, depending on where you are.
One reader is administering an estate right now and needs to know whether this applies to them. Another is weighing up a deed of variation and needs the two clocks kept straight. A third is planning a will and wants to understand what a continuing trust actually commits their executor to.
Find out in the first hour, not two years from now
A personalised read-through of the estate you're administering — including whether the will creates a trust that will still be running at the two-year mark.
See what's included→Redirecting an inheritanceDeed of variation: the 2-year rule
The separate deadline for making the deed itself — and why a late deed can leave its own trust with very little time before this page's rules apply to it.
Read the deed of variation page→Planning aheadLife interest trusts and IPDIs, explained
A life interest for a surviving spouse — an IPDI — is this page's own headline example of a trust that outlives its TRS exclusion. See what it actually commits your executor to.
Read the life interest & IPDI page→