The form is called PA1P, and the fee to send it in is £526 — that has been the figure since 13 July 2026, for any estate worth more than £5,000. Below five thousand pounds you pay nothing. Above it, the fee is the same whether the estate is a mid-terrace in Mansfield or half of a Surrey close: £526, flat, indifferent to your grief.
You did not plan to be doing this at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night. But there is a will, and it names you the executor, and that word — *executor* — turns out to be less a title than a to-do list nobody handed you.
Start with what PA1P actually is. It is the paper route to a grant of probate when the person who died left a will. (If there were no will, you would be reaching for its sibling, PA1A, and a different set of rules about who may apply.) The will exists. Your job is to prove it, and to be recognised as the person entitled to gather in the accounts, sell the house, pay what is owed, and hand on what is left. The grant is the key. PA1P is how you ask for the key.
Here is the part that catches people, and it catches them hard. You cannot apply for probate until you have first told HM Revenue & Customs what the estate is worth. The tax question comes before the grant question — always, in that order. Report the value, settle whatever inheritance tax is due (or establish that none is), and only then does the probate application become something the system will accept. Get the sequence wrong and your paperwork comes back to you, unglamorously, at the start of the queue. The form does not explain this urgency on its face. It simply assumes you already knew.
Then there is the will itself. Not a copy. The original — the one with the real signatures, the one you found in the drawer under the good scissors. You have to put it in the post. The single most irreplaceable piece of paper in the whole business, and the process asks you to let go of it, into a sorting office, toward a PO box, on trust. People photograph it first. People stand at the counter and hesitate. That hesitation is not weakness. It is the correct emotional response to being asked to gamble the one document you cannot get again.
And a death certificate, certified, not the photocopy the funeral director slipped into the folder. And your own details, spelled exactly as they appear on the will, because a middle initial in one place and not the other is the kind of small discrepancy that turns twelve weeks into twenty.
Because the wait, once you have sent it all, is the quiet antagonist here. It is measured in weeks, sometimes in months, and there is very little you can do to hurry it. You will want sealed copies of the grant when it finally comes — order the extra copies with your application, because every bank, every registrar, every share registry wants its own original, and they will not share one between them. Plan for that now and you save yourself a second wait later.
None of this is difficult in the way that quantum mechanics is difficult. It is difficult in the way that assembling flat-pack furniture at midnight is difficult: no single step is beyond you, but the instructions assume a calm you do not have, in an order they never quite spell out, while the clock runs and the phone keeps ringing with people who mean well.
This is where Chris comes in — late, deliberately, because the form is the thing, not the tool. You tell Chris what you are holding: a will, your name in it, an estate you are still adding up. Chris walks the PA1P with you in the right order — the HMRC step first, so nothing bounces; the details cross-checked against the will, so a stray initial does not cost you a month; the copies you will need, ordered up front. Not advice on whether to apply. The structure of the application itself, built with you, section by section, until the thing on the screen is the thing you can post.
What you end at is a completed PA1P — filled, consistent, in sequence, ready to go in the envelope with the original will you photographed first. The key, asked for properly.
Come back when the grant lands and there’s the next form to face — there usually is, and you won’t have to meet it cold.