Probate charged by the hour
An hourly rate prices the time rather than the job, so the rate on its own tells you almost nothing about the bill.
What firms charge
724 firms publish an hourly rate for probate work, across 1,155 published figures. The middle of that range is £240.
Excludes VAT unless the firm said otherwise, and excludes court fees. Every firm, with its source.
What this covers
Firms that charge by the hour publish a rate, often several: a partner, a solicitor and a paralegal each carry a different one. What they rarely publish is how many hours an estate takes, which is the half of the sum that decides the total.
Ask for an estimated range of hours in writing, ask who will actually do the work, and ask to be told before the estimate is exceeded rather than after.
Common questions
- Why do we not rank firms by hourly rate?
- Because a rate is not a price. Listing a cheap rate above an expensive fixed fee would tell you the wrong thing, so hourly figures appear on a firm's own page but never as its headline price.
- What is a reasonable question to ask about an hourly rate?
- Ask for the estimated total, in writing, with the assumptions it rests on, and ask what happens to the estimate if an asset turns out to be harder to deal with than expected.
What would this cost for your estate?
Tell us what you are dealing with once, and firms that publish a price for this work come back with one for your estate. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Related
Part of probate and estate administration. Every figure on this site comes from the published fee dataset.