The form is called PA1A, and you will meet it about a fortnight after the funeral, on the afternoon the building society tells you — politely, finally — that it cannot release your father’s balance without a grant. He left no will. He meant to. There was a leaflet somewhere, a conversation once about “sorting all that out,” and then there wasn’t time, and now the sorting-out is yours.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Not the grief — you were braced for the grief. The paperwork. The particular indignity of having to apply, in writing, for permission to deal with the estate of a man whose bins you put out for fifteen years.
Letters of administration is the name for that permission. It is what a grant of probate would have been, had there been a will to prove. Without one, the law does not simply hand the estate to the nearest relative and wish them luck. It sets out an order — spouse or civil partner first, then children, then further out — and the person entitled applies to be appointed. The estate does not go to whoever loved him most. It follows the intestacy rules, and the intestacy rules do not care.
Here is where they bite. If your father was married and left, say, a house and some savings, your mother does not automatically get everything. She takes his personal possessions, the first £322,000 of the estate (that figure has held since 26 July 2023), and then half of whatever is left. The other half is divided between the children. Most people assume the surviving spouse inherits the lot. Most people are wrong, and they find out at exactly the wrong moment.
There is a further wrinkle. If one of the people entitled is under eighteen — a grandchild, say, standing in for a parent who died first — you cannot apply on your own. Where a beneficiary is a minor or a life interest arises, the grant has to be made to at least two administrators (Senior Courts Act 1981, section 114(2)). So you telephone your brother, who has opinions about all of this, and ask him to sign too.
The signing is the one part that has got kinder. You no longer swear an oath in front of a solicitor with the commissioner’s fee ready. Since November 2018 you complete a statement of truth — you sign it, you do not swear it, and nobody has to witness your hand. A small mercy, administered flatly.
Then the money. The application fee is £526 for an estate worth more than £5,000, and nothing at all if the estate is £5,000 or under — the figures that took effect on 13 July 2026. You pay it to get permission to reach money that is, in every human sense, already the family’s. Then you wait. Weeks. The grant arrives when it arrives.
None of this is difficult, exactly. It is just relentless, and it assumes you already know things nobody told you: who is entitled to apply, and in what order; what the estate is actually worth; whether a minor’s share triggers the two-administrator rule; which answer on the PA1A quietly contradicts the three before it. Get a detail wrong and the form comes back, the wait resets, and the building society writes to you again.
You do not have to pay a solicitor to find out what the form wants. GOV.UK sets out the intestacy order and the application process for free. Citizens Advice will talk it through with you. Read those first — they are the honest starting line, and for many people they are enough.
But when you sit down with the actual PA1A and the questions begin — which relatives count, in which order, what goes where — that is the part a leaflet cannot do beside you. Chris can. Tell Chris what happened and who is left, and Chris works through the application with you, in plain words, one question at a time, until what you have in front of you is a completed PA1A for letters of administration: the finished form, ready for you to read over and sign.
Not permission granted. Permission properly asked for, first time.
Come back when the grant lands and there’s the estate itself to sort — we’ll be here.