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Probate is a legal term usually used to describe the entire process of settling someone’s estate when they die.

Professionals providing probate services - such as Beyond, probate solicitors and specialists - take care of this process, gathering up the estate and transferring it on to those who should inherit.

While some probate solicitors will charge you an hourly rate, or take a percentage of the estate, we will tell you our fee up front, right at the beginning.

Once that probate fee is set, it will stay the same.

Find out more about solicitors’ fees for probate and how we compare here.

If it’s a small estate, you may not need a grant of probate to access things like bank accounts. If you are the spouse of someone who has died, and all property, assets and funds were held jointly, you will also likely be able to access the estate without one.

But there are a lot of other things to think about when it comes to settling the estate - making sure that tax forms are filled out correctly, notifying the right companies, paying debts, setting up trusts and any number of other small details. We can help with that.

When you call us for a quote, we’ll ask you a few simple questions to check whether you really need our probate service. And if you don’t - it hasn’t cost you a thing.

Find out more about when probate is required here.

When someone dies without leaving a will (known as dying ‘intestate’), their estate is inherited by their closest living relative - usually their spouse or their children.

The probate process is much the same, except that letters of administration are applied for instead of a grant of probate (see above). You can still use a probate service to sort out the estate.

There is no requirement to use a solicitor for probate. We do have legal and financial experts on our team who have helped thousands of families through the probate process. However, we don’t call ourselves probate solicitors or lawyers, because our service is far more comprehensive than that.

Legally, anyone can take on the responsibility of probate administration, although many prefer to leave this complicated and stressful task to a professional.

It’s a good idea to compare probate professionals on price and the services they include before settling on one. You can change your probate provider even if your family solicitor is named as one of the executors in the will.

When comparing probate services, helpful questions to ask are: how much they charge; whether that fee is a percentage of the estate, an hourly rate, or a fixed fee; whether the fee will increase in the event of a claim or complication; and what they will do in return for that fee.