Common Mistakes Executors Make When Valuing House Contents

If you arrived looking for what probate actually costs, the short answer first, because it is a fair question and it does not need a calculator. The court fee for a probate application is £526 where the estate is worth more than £5,000, and there is no fee at all where it is £5,000 or less. Extra copies of the grant are £2 each ordered with the application, or £16 each afterwards. Anything beyond that is a solicitor's charge, which varies by firm, and the current official position on the court fee is always on the gov.uk probate fees page.

The rest of this page is about the thing that costs executors far more than the fee does, which is getting the contents valuation wrong. None of it is advice on your own estate, and where tax is in play the solicitor or accountant should see your figures first.

These are drawn from what the rules themselves make easy to get wrong, working from the standard HMRC applies and the form executors actually have to complete, rather than from any list of horror stories.

Valuing at replacement cost instead of resale value

The most common error by a distance, and almost always an honest one. The test is what an item would fetch if sold on the open market, not what it would cost to buy another one.

It usually happens because the insurance schedule is the only document with numbers on it, so the numbers get copied across. The result is an estate declared at more than it was worth, tax potentially paid on value that never existed, and a large unexplained gap when the contents later sell for what they are actually worth. The full difference between the two bases is set out in probate valuation against insurance valuation.

Using the wrong date

Values are fixed at the date of death, not the date you got into the house, and not the date anything was eventually sold. For furniture this is academic. For a car, for gold, for anything with a market that moves, it is not.

The practical fix takes two minutes. When you look up a value, screenshot it and note the date you are valuing to. Months later you will not remember which figure was which, and reconstructing it is far harder than recording it.

Burying an individually reportable item in the general total

The contents schedule does not treat all goods alike. Individual pieces of jewellery worth £1,500 or more have to be listed separately, and so do vehicles, boats and aircraft, and antiques, works of art and collections. Only after those are dealt with does everything else go in as one combined total.

Sweeping a good ring into the household total is not a clever simplification. It is a reporting error, and it is exactly the kind of thing that surfaces when the item is later sold or mentioned in a will. Where you are genuinely unsure whether something crosses the line, list it. Listing an item that turns out to be ordinary costs nothing at all.

Assuming the figures do not matter because there is no tax to pay

Plenty of estates fall comfortably under the £325,000 threshold and have no inheritance tax to pay. It is tempting to conclude that the contents figure is therefore a formality.

Two things say otherwise. The estate account has to be honest whether or not tax arises, and executors carry a personal duty to the beneficiaries for the figures in it. And the probate value becomes the base cost for anything a beneficiary later sells, which matters because capital gains tax can apply to personal possessions sold for £6,000 or more, cars excepted. A contents value pulled out of the air can create a problem for somebody else years later.

Showing no working at all

A single round total with nothing behind it is the most queryable thing an executor can submit. Not because round numbers are wrong, the form only asks for one figure, but because there is nothing to point at if anyone asks how it was reached.

What good working looks like is unglamorous: photographs of each room before anything moved, a room by room list, and dated evidence of completed sale prices for anything notable. Completed prices, not asking prices, because what somebody hopes to get proves nothing about what things fetch. The detail of what to keep is in what HMRC actually requires for house contents.

Letting things leave the house before they are recorded

This one causes more family trouble than tax trouble. Items get taken as keepsakes in the first fortnight, entirely innocently and often with everyone's blessing at the time, and then nobody can say afterwards what was in the house or what it was worth.

The valuation is meant to capture what was owned at the date of death, so anything that has already gone still belongs in it. Photographing every room before anyone takes anything is the whole solution, and it costs one afternoon. It also protects the executor, who is the person who has to answer for the figures.

Booking the clearance before anyone has looked properly

Understandable, given the pressure to get an empty house, and irreversible. Once a van has been and gone, both the contents and any evidence of what they were worth are gone with it, and the valuation becomes an estimate of things nobody can now examine.

We are not against clearance and there are houses where it is plainly the right answer, mostly where the contents are worn, damaged or simply not saleable. What we would say is that the looking should happen before the booking, not after. What drives a clearance quote is covered in the house clearance cost guide, and the decision itself in whether it is worth selling before you book a clearance.

Overvaluing the ordinary and undervaluing the unfamiliar

These are opposite errors and they turn up together in the same house, both driven by the same thing: valuing by memory rather than by market.

A good quality three piece suite that cost a great deal in 1998 is worth very little now, because almost nobody buys used upholstery. Meanwhile the unremarkable side table nobody looked at twice may be worth considerably more than the suite, because someone collects that maker. Neither fact is available to a person walking round on instinct, and both are available in ten minutes of checking what comparable items have actually sold for.

Value by what things sell for, not by what they cost or what they meant. The two are almost never the same number.

If you are doing this for somebody else

A fair number of people reading this are not the family. They are solicitors, professional executors, or clearance operators being asked by a client whether anything in the house is worth selling before the van is booked. If that is you, the arrangement for professionals listing sales on behalf of their own clients is in a new revenue channel for house clearance companies.

Where to start if you have not begun

Photograph everything, list it room by room, identify the handful of items that might carry real value, get a proper opinion on those and only those, and keep your working. That is most of the job, and it avoids every mistake above.

If you are earlier than that and still working out whether you need a valuation at all, start with what a probate valuation is and whether you need one. If the valuation is done and the house is the problem, the four routes are compared honestly in selling house contents after probate.

And if you would rather talk to somebody before touching any of it, you can have a conversation with us first, with nothing to sign and no obligation at the end of it.

Common questions

Is there a probate fees calculator I can use?

For the court fee there is nothing to calculate: it is £526 above £5,000 of estate value and nothing at or below it, so a calculator would have one step. Solicitors' charges are the variable part, and those are quoted by the firm rather than derived from a formula, so ask two or three for written quotes rather than trusting an online estimate.

Am I personally liable if I get the figures wrong?

Executors do carry personal responsibility for the accuracy of what they submit, which is precisely why reasoned figures and kept evidence matter so much. An honest figure you can explain is a very different position from a guess you cannot. This is the clearest case on the page for taking proper professional advice rather than relying on a guide.

What if the contents sell for much more than I declared?

Raise it with whoever is handling the estate rather than leaving it. A modest difference is unremarkable, since a valuation is an estimate and real sales vary. A large one suggests the original figure was wrong, and corrections offered up front are handled very differently from discrepancies found later.

Can beneficiaries challenge the valuation?

They can, and disagreements about contents are more common than disagreements about money, because contents carry feeling as well as value. An independent valuation and a photographic record are the two things that most reliably keep that conversation civil.

Do I need to value things going to charity?

They were still owned at the date of death, so they still form part of what has to be reported. How a charitable gift is then treated in the account is a separate matter and one to put to whoever is preparing the forms.