How Is a House Valued for Probate? 2026 UK Executor Guide

By Lisa Hayes · 6 September 2026

A probate valuation is the open market value of the property on the day the person died — the price it could reasonably have been expected to fetch on that specific date, not what you would like for it now and not what an agent thinks they can market it at. For most estates you will need either a written report from a RICS chartered surveyor or a set of estate agent appraisals, and HMRC checks the figure you submit against its own evidence through the District Valuer. Value it badly and you either hand over inheritance tax you never owed, or you get a correction, interest and possibly a penalty.

What is a probate valuation, and how is it different from a normal house valuation?

Two numbers, two entirely different jobs.

An ordinary valuation is a forward-looking marketing exercise. An agent walks round, thinks about what will get them the instruction, and gives you a figure they hope to achieve over the next few months. A probate valuation is a backward-looking legal statement. It fixes what the house was worth on one particular day, and it becomes part of a tax return that you sign a declaration on.

The legal test is set out in section 160 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984: the price the property "might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold in the open market at that time". That phrase does a lot of work. It assumes a willing seller and a willing buyer, adequate marketing, and no special circumstances. It does not assume a rushed sale, a family arrangement, or a grieving executor who wants the whole thing over with by Christmas.

So if the house was worth £340,000 in March when your mother died, and the market has since softened and you accept £318,000 in October, the probate value is still £340,000. The sale price is separate. It matters — and we will come to why — but it does not retrospectively rewrite the date-of-death figure.

If the terminology is unfamiliar, our property jargon explained guide covers the rest of the vocabulary you are about to meet.

Who is allowed to value a house for probate?

GOV.UK is refreshingly blunt about this. Its guidance on valuing an estate says you can get any property or land valued by an estate agent or a chartered surveyor. There is no rule that says you must use a surveyor.

There is also no rule that says HMRC has to accept what you send.

That is the whole tension in a single sentence, and it is why executors get caught out. The permissive wording makes people think three free agent appraisals will do. Sometimes they will. Sometimes they will cost the estate a great deal of money.

My rule of thumb, and I will defend it: if there is any realistic prospect of inheritance tax being payable, or if the property is in any way unusual, get a Red Book valuation. The fee is an expense of the estate. It is the cheapest insurance policy an executor will ever buy.

What about Zoopla, Rightmove and the online estimators?

Use them for orientation, not evidence. An automated model has never seen inside the house, does not know the kitchen is from 1987, and cannot tell you what the property was worth on 14 February. Sending an executor's estimate to HMRC that traces back to an algorithm is asking for a challenge. We have written separately on how accurate Zoopla estimates really are, and the short answer is: not accurate enough for a tax return.

The same applies to council tax bands. They are based on 1991 values in England and Scotland and 2003 in Wales. They tell you nothing useful about 2026.

Which date do you value the house at, and what if you are late?

The date of death. Always.

This trips people up because probate takes months and life gets in the way. You might not instruct anyone until eight months after the funeral. That is fine — a surveyor can produce a retrospective valuation using comparable sales from around the death date. What you must not do is take a valuation carried out today and present it as though it were the date-of-death figure. In a rising market you will overstate the estate and overpay tax. In a falling one you will understate it and invite a correction.

Tell the valuer explicitly: "I need an open market valuation as at [date], for inheritance tax purposes under section 160 IHTA 1984." Any competent RICS valuer will know exactly what you mean. If they look blank, find another one.

How do you value a jointly owned house for probate?

This is where most DIY probate valuations go wrong, and the rules are genuinely counter-intuitive.

Start with how the property was held. If you are not sure, the Land Registry title will tell you: a restriction in the proprietorship register usually indicates tenants in common.

The GOV.UK worked example is worth memorising. A property owned by four joint tenants, worth £200,000 at the date of death, gives a £50,000 share. Knock off 10% and the figure that goes on the return is £45,000.

For tenants in common, HMRC's Inheritance Tax Manual accepts a discount from the vacant possession value to reflect how hard it is to sell an undivided share. Ten per cent is the usual starting point; 15% is often accepted where the surviving co-owner is living in the property as their main home and cannot simply be turned out. The Valuation Office decides on the facts, so make your case in writing rather than just applying a number and hoping.

If the co-owner is refusing to engage at all, that is a different problem with its own route through the courts; see our guide to what happens when a co-owner will not sell. And where the joint owner has died and you are the survivor working out what to do next, selling a house after a joint owner dies walks through the conveyancing side.

What does a probate valuation cost, and how long does the whole process take?

• £0estate agent appraisal
• £300–£800typical RICS Red Book valuation
• £526probate fee, estates over £5,000
• 6 monthsto pay any inheritance tax
• 12 monthsto file the IHT400

The valuation itself is quick. A surveyor will normally inspect within a fortnight and report within a week or two of that. The bottleneck is everything downstream: getting the full picture of the estate, filing with HMRC where required, waiting for a tax reference, paying, and only then applying to the Probate Registry.

Two deadlines matter more than the others, and they are not the same date. Inheritance tax is due by the end of the sixth month after the month of death — miss it and HMRC charges interest, no exceptions for grief or slow banks. The IHT400 account itself must be with HMRC within twelve months of the death. People routinely assume the two are one deadline. They are not, and the tax one comes first.

On fees: the probate application fee in England and Wales rose from £300 to £526 on 13 July 2026 for estates valued above £5,000, under the Ministry of Justice's July 2026 fee changes. Copies of the grant ordered at the same time as the application now cost £2 each rather than £16, which is a small mercy. The fee is recoverable from the estate.

Do you always have to report the value to HMRC?

No, and this is the single biggest relief for most families.

Most estates are "excepted estates", which means you report an estimated value when you apply for probate and never touch an IHT400. An estate is usually excepted if its value is below the £325,000 nil-rate band; or if it is worth £650,000 or less and you are transferring an unused threshold from a spouse who died first; or if everything passes to a surviving UK spouse, civil partner or a qualifying charity and the estate is under £3 million.

Full details are needed even where no tax is due if, for example, the deceased gave away more than £250,000 in the seven years before death, kept the benefit of something they had given away, left an estate over £3 million, or held foreign assets worth more than £100,000.

Being an excepted estate does not mean the number does not matter. It still goes on the probate application, it still becomes the base cost for capital gains tax later, and HMRC can still open an enquiry. "No tax due" is not the same as "nobody is looking".

How does HMRC check a probate valuation?

Quietly, and with better data than you have.

HMRC refers property figures to the District Valuer, part of the Valuation Office Agency. The DV has access to Land Registry sold prices, previous valuations, planning history and the VOA's own records. If your figure looks out of line with what comparable houses on the street actually achieved, it gets picked up. What follows is a negotiation between the DV and whoever valued for the estate , which is considerably easier if that person is a chartered surveyor with a written report rather than an estate agent who scribbled a number on a compliments slip eighteen months ago.

The case executors should know about is Akanwo v HMRC [2018] UKUT 0113 (LC). The executor returned a terraced house at £200,000, based on two indicative estate agent valuations and no formal surveyor's report. The District Valuer said £260,000, relying on comparables including a near-identical house two doors down that had sold for £264,000 a month before the valuation date, and applying a 5% discount because the property was tenanted. The property later sold for £312,000 less than eighteen months after the death. The Upper Tribunal backed the District Valuer.

Read that again: the £60,000 gap was created by trying to save a few hundred pounds on a valuation report. GOV.UK also warns plainly that you may have to pay a financial penalty if you give inaccurate information.

What happens if the house sells for more than the probate value?

Then the estate has made a capital gain, and the probate value is the base cost.

This is the quiet trade-off nobody explains at the outset. A low probate value saves inheritance tax at 40%. It also creates a larger capital gain later, taxed at 24% for residential property in the hands of personal representatives. If the estate paid no inheritance tax at all, a low value has saved nothing and cost something.

Personal representatives get an annual exempt amount of £3,000 for the tax year of death and the two tax years following. That is one allowance for the whole estate, not one per beneficiary, and it does not go far against a £40,000 gain.

There is a well-worn planning move here: instead of the executors selling and paying 24%, they appropriate the property to the beneficiaries before exchange, so each beneficiary uses their own annual exemption and their own rate. Done properly it can save real money. Done after exchange it saves nothing. Talk to the estate's solicitor early, not the week before completion. Our guide to capital gains tax when you sell a home covers the mechanics in more detail.

What if the house sells for less than the probate value?

You may be able to claw back the inheritance tax, using form IHT38 — "claim for relief, loss on sale of land". It is one of the most underused reliefs in the system.

The rules, and they are strict:

1. The sale must complete within four years of the date of death.
2. The claim must be made within seven years of the date of death.
3. Inheritance tax must actually have been paid on the estate. No tax paid, no relief — there is nothing to reclaim.
4. You must report every sale of land and buildings from the estate in that four-year window, including the ones that sold for more than probate value. You cannot cherry-pick the losses.
5. The claim is made by the person who bore the original tax, and once made it cannot be withdrawn if it turns out to be disadvantageous.

Point four is the one that catches people. If the estate contained two properties and one sold below probate value while the other sold above, the gains and losses are netted off. Executors who only report the loss are making an inaccurate claim.

Should you deliberately value the house low to reduce inheritance tax?

No. And I would like to be unambiguous about it, because this advice gets passed around families like a recipe.

Three reasons it fails. First, the District Valuer will very often catch it, and the sale price is the loudest possible evidence against you — as Akanwo showed. Second, you are signing a declaration; an inaccurate figure exposes you personally as executor to penalties, and executors are personally liable. Third, even when it works, it usually just moves the tax from inheritance tax to capital gains tax and creates a mess for the beneficiaries.

The mirror-image mistake is just as common: valuing high to inflate the CGT base cost when the estate is nowhere near the inheritance tax threshold. That is technically less dangerous, because there is no tax loss to HMRC on the IHT side, but an unsupportable figure is still an unsupportable figure, and it can distort how the estate is divided between beneficiaries who take the house and beneficiaries who take cash.

Value it honestly, evidence it properly, and let the reliefs do their job.

How does selling to a cash buyer affect the probate value?

A quick sale below market value does not set the open market value. Section 160 assumes proper marketing and a willing seller, and a seven-day sale to a house-buying company is by definition not that. So the probate figure stays where it was.

But the sale is still evidence, and it is evidence the District Valuer may look at. If you take 82% of market value from a cash buyer three months after the death, be ready to explain the gap: that it was a below-market offer accepted for speed and certainty, not a market-tested price. A written valuation dated to the death makes that conversation short. Nothing makes it shorter.

There are perfectly sound reasons executors go down this route. An empty inherited house is expensive: buildings insurance for unoccupied property costs more and often carries conditions, the council tax exemption after death is time-limited before a full charge and potentially a long-term empty premium kicks in, and the estate carries the risk of leaks, break-ins and damp for as long as it holds the keys. We set out the full running costs in our guide to selling an empty house.

Where a genuine cash sale earns its keep is when it also unlocks an IHT38 claim: you take the certainty, and the estate recovers inheritance tax on the shortfall. If you are weighing it up, read what "we buy any house" companies actually pay before you accept anything, and compare more than one offer. Our page on verified cash house buyers explains what a legitimate one looks like.

What if the property is in poor condition or has legal problems?

Then the valuation gets more important, not less, and this is precisely where a free agent appraisal falls down.

Open market value has to reflect what a buyer would actually pay on the day of death, with all the property's faults. A house with structural movement, a short lease, no building regulations paperwork, or a construction type most lenders will not touch is worth less than the postcode average, sometimes dramatically less. A surveyor can evidence that. An agent's optimistic guess cannot, and an inflated probate value on a property nobody wants to buy is the worst of all worlds: tax on money the estate will never see.

Common value-suppressing issues on inherited properties:

• Structural movement — often only discovered when a buyer's survey comes back; see selling a house with subsidence
• Short lease on a flat, where the value falls away sharply below about 80 years
• Non-standard construction — concrete, steel-framed, prefab — which restricts the buyer pool to cash
• Unmodernised throughout, sometimes to the point of being unmortgageable
• Missing paperwork: no FENSA certificates, no building regs sign-off, no gas safety history
• Sitting tenants or a licence in place, which reduces vacant possession value

The reverse also applies. If the garden has development potential, or there is a plot that could be sold separately, the valuation must include "hope value" — what a buyer would pay for the prospect of planning permission, even without it. Tribunals have repeatedly upheld HMRC on this. Ignoring hope value on a large plot is a reliable way to get a correction.

And if the honest answer is that the property is close to unsaleable in its current state, our guide on selling an unsellable house sets out the realistic routes.

Can you sell the house before probate is granted?

You can market it and you can agree a sale. You cannot complete the transfer without the grant, because the buyer's solicitor needs to see that whoever is signing has legal authority to sell. In practice that means the property sits at "sold subject to contract" while you wait, which is exactly where chains break.

The valuation matters here too: an agreed price sitting on file for months while probate grinds through is a very visible comparable if the market has moved. We cover the sequencing in can you sell a house before probate is granted, and the wider process in our selling an inherited property guide.

Where the property was held in a trust rather than owned outright, the valuation and tax treatment change again; see selling a house held in a trust.

How do you actually get a probate valuation? A step-by-step

1. Establish the date of death and how the property was held. Pull the Land Registry title (£7 online) and check for a restriction indicating tenants in common.
2. Decide agent or surveyor. If the estate is comfortably under the threshold and the house is ordinary, three agent appraisals in writing will usually do. Anything else, instruct a RICS Registered Valuer.
3. Brief the valuer properly. Say in writing that you need an open market valuation as at the date of death for IHT purposes under s.160 IHTA 1984, and mention any tenancy, condition issue or development potential up front.
4. Gather your own comparables anyway. Land Registry sold prices are free and searchable. Save the ones nearest in date, street and property type. If the DV ever queries the figure, you will be glad you did.
5. Apply the joint ownership rules before the number goes on the form — not after.
6. Check whether the estate is excepted. If it is, you report an estimate with the probate application and stop. If not, the IHT400 route applies.
7. Pay any inheritance tax by the end of the sixth month after the month of death, then apply for probate and pay the £526 fee.
8. Keep everything. Valuation report, comparables, correspondence, photographs of condition. HMRC can enquire years later, and photographs of a 1970s kitchen are worth a great deal when someone asks why you valued 12% below the street average.

The mistakes I see most often

• Using a current valuation for a historic death. The single most common error, and it cuts both ways.
• Taking the highest agent figure. Executors instinctively pick the biggest number, as if selling. In probate the biggest number is a tax liability.
• Claiming a co-ownership discount on a property jointly owned with a spouse. Blocked by the related property rules.
• Forgetting the contents. Furniture, jewellery and cars all form part of the estate; GOV.UK expects a realistic selling price for each, and a professional valuation for anything worth over £1,500.
• Missing the IHT38 window. Four years from death to sell, seven to claim. Nobody sends a reminder.
• Never revisiting the figure. If circumstances change — a survey uncovers something, the market shifts sharply — the estate has options. Silence is not one of them.

What if you disagree with HMRC's figure?

You negotiate. The District Valuer's opening position is not final, and a chartered surveyor acting for the estate can and does argue comparables, condition and adjustments. Most disputes settle at that stage. Beyond it lies the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber), which is where Akanwo ended up — slow, expensive, and worth it only where the sums are large.

Your leverage in that negotiation is entirely a function of the evidence you gathered at the start. This is the practical argument for the Red Book report: not that HMRC cannot disagree with a surveyor, but that a surveyor can disagree back, on equal terms, with documentation.

Working out what the house is really worth

Probate valuation is a tax exercise. What you can actually sell for is a separate question, and executors need both numbers to make good decisions — particularly when beneficiaries are impatient, the house is standing empty, and every month costs the estate money.

If you want a realistic sense of the market figure alongside your probate valuation, start with our guides to how much your house is worth and getting an accurate free house valuation. And if speed and certainty matter more than squeezing out the last few per cent — which, with an empty inherited property and a tax deadline, it often does — it costs nothing to compare cash offers side by side before you commit to anything. Get the probate number right first. Then decide how you want to sell.