House Contents Probate Valuation: What HMRC Actually Requires
HMRC wants open market value at the date of death, jewellery over £1,500 listed individually, and the rest as one total. What the form actually asks.
Most guidance on valuing house contents for probate stops at "get a professional valuation" and leaves you no wiser about what is actually being asked for. So here is the specific version: which form, which boxes, what standard, and what level of detail HMRC genuinely expects on a normal house.
None of this is advice on your own estate, and where there is tax at stake the solicitor or accountant handling it should see your figures before they go anywhere.
The form: IHT407
Household and personal goods are not reported on the main inheritance tax account. They go on a separate schedule, form IHT407, which is submitted alongside form IHT400. It exists precisely because contents behave differently from everything else in an estate and need their own treatment.
The form is short, which surprises people who have been dreading it. Its structure is the useful part, because it tells you exactly where HMRC wants detail and where it does not.
| Section | What goes in it | Level of detail required |
|---|---|---|
| Jewellery | Individual pieces valued at £1,500 or more | Listed one by one, described and valued separately |
| Vehicles, boats and aircraft | Cars, motorcycles, caravans, boats | Listed individually with make, model and detail |
| Antiques, works of art or collections | Individual pieces and whole collections | Listed individually with descriptions and values |
| Other household and personal goods | Everything else in the house | A single combined total, no itemised list |
| Insurance question | Whether the goods in the section above were separately insured | Yes or no, with a copy of the policy if yes |
Read that last full row again, because it is the single most reassuring fact in this whole subject. The ordinary contents of a house, the sofa and the beds and the crockery and the garden tools, go in as one number. You are not being asked to produce a schedule of the kitchen.
The valuation standard, and why it produces low numbers
Everything on that form is valued to one test, set by section 160 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984: the price the item might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold on the open market at that time.
Fetch, not cost. Fetch, not replace. Fetch, not what it is worth to the family. This is a secondhand valuation of secondhand goods, and secondhand household furniture is worth strikingly little. That is not HMRC being harsh, it is simply what the market pays, as anyone who has tried to sell a three piece suite already knows.
Two further points from HMRC's own guidance on that standard are worth knowing. The costs of selling are not deducted from the value, so you do not knock off what an auctioneer would charge. And where selling a large quantity at once would depress the price, that depression is disregarded. You value the goods, not the difficulty of the disposal.
The date that matters
Every figure is as at the date of death. Not the date you visited, not the date the valuer came, not the date anything sold. If a car was worth eight thousand pounds in March and the person died in March, it is an eight thousand pound car, whatever happened to used car prices by the time you got round to selling it in September.
In practice this mostly matters for vehicles, gold, and anything else with a moving market. For a wardrobe it makes no difference at all. But it is the kind of detail that is easy to get casually wrong and awkward to unpick later, which is why it appears on our list of the mistakes executors most often make.
How much evidence you need to keep
More than most people keep, and it costs nothing to do at the time. The figure you submit should be one you could still explain in two years to somebody who was not there.
- Photographs of every room before anything is moved. Ten minutes with a phone, and it settles a great many later questions about what was actually in the house.
- Your room by room list, even though only the total goes on the form. The total is much easier to defend when there is a list behind it.
- How you priced anything notable. Screenshots of completed sales of comparable items, dated. Not asking prices, which prove nothing, but what things actually sold for.
- Any written valuation you commissioned, stating the basis it was prepared on.
- Sale records if the contents were subsequently sold, since a real open market sale is the best evidence of open market value there is.
The insurance schedule question
The form asks whether the general household goods were insured separately, and asks for the policy if they were. It is worth understanding why, because it catches people out.
An insurance schedule is useful evidence that an item existed and was thought worth insuring. What it is not is a probate value, because insurance works on what it would cost to replace something, which is a completely different and much larger number. Lifting figures straight off the household policy is one of the quickest ways to overstate an estate. We have set that difference out properly in probate valuation against insurance valuation.
What HMRC is actually looking for
Proportionate honesty. The form's own structure shows the priorities: identify the pieces that could carry real value, deal with those individually and properly, and put a sensible total on the rest.
Queries tend to arise where something looks out of place. A large house with a suspiciously small contents figure. A total that appears to have been rounded to the nearest convenient number without any workings. A valuable item mentioned in the will but absent from the schedule. None of those are traps, they are simply gaps that invite a question, and all three are avoided by doing the list properly on the day.
A figure you can explain is a valuation. A figure that sounded about right is a guess, and the difference only becomes visible when somebody asks.
What this means for what you do next
There is a practical link between the valuation and the disposal that is easy to miss. Because open market value is what the goods would fetch, a genuine open market sale is the cleanest possible evidence of the figure you submitted. Selling contents properly, with prices set and buyers competing on equal terms, produces a record. Handing everything to a clearance firm produces nothing except an empty house.
That is worth weighing when you decide what to do with the house. The four routes and their honest trade offs are compared in selling house contents after probate, and if you want to see what the sale side of it looks like from a buyer's point of view, how a house contents sale works explains the format from the other end.
If the valuation is behind you and the house itself is now the problem, you are welcome to talk it through with us before committing to anything. No obligation, and we would rather tell you a sale is wrong for that house than take it on.
Common questions
Does every item of jewellery have to be listed?
No. Individual pieces valued at £1,500 or more are listed separately. Everything below that can sit in the general total with the rest of the household goods. The threshold is per item, not for the jewellery as a whole, so a drawer of costume pieces does not need itemising however many there are.
What counts as an antique or a collection?
Anything with a value driven by rarity, maker or provenance rather than by ordinary usefulness, and any set assembled deliberately: stamps, coins, records, first editions, militaria. If you are unsure whether something qualifies, list it. Listing something that turns out to be ordinary costs you nothing. The reverse is not true.
Do I include things that were given away before death?
Not on this schedule, which covers what was owned at the date of death. Gifts made beforehand are dealt with separately in the inheritance tax rules and can still matter to the estate, which is exactly the sort of thing to raise with whoever is handling the account rather than resolve yourself.
What about a car left outside the house?
It goes in the vehicles section, individually, valued at what it would have fetched at the date of death. Trade guide prices for the right make, model, year and mileage are reasonable evidence, and worth screenshotting on the day you look them up.
Can I just put a round number for the contents?
You can, and a round total is fine in itself, since the form asks for one figure. What matters is whether there is genuine reasoning behind it. A total of two thousand pounds reached by listing every room is defensible. The same total reached by deciding two thousand sounded about right is the one that generates a letter.
Does it matter if there is no inheritance tax to pay?
The tax stakes disappear but the figures still do real work, both in the estate account and in dividing things fairly between beneficiaries. The starting point for whether you need a formal valuation at all is in what a probate valuation is and whether you need one.
