In 2017, and again in 2019, the government proposed that the fee for applying for a grant of probate should be banded against the value of the estate. At the top end, the fee would have been £6,000 — a number, the Ministry of Justice was at pains to point out, that nonetheless represented less than half a per cent of the estates concerned.
Both proposals were withdrawn. The argument that defeated them was not that the fee was too high in absolute terms.
It was that a fee for a service is meant to recover the cost of providing that service, and that a charge scaled to the value of the estate rather than to the cost of the work is a tax wearing a fee's clothes. The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments doubted the charges were fees at all within the powers being relied on, and the Ministry did not carry the point.
What replaced the proposal
In May 2024, a far more modest reform took effect. The single-tier fee rose from £273 to £300 for all estates above £5,000. Estates below £5,000 pay nothing. The reform was justified on cost-recovery grounds and passed without controversy. The political appetite for treating the probate registry as a revenue stream had visibly departed.
That £300 has since gone too. The Court and Tribunal Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2026 raised the application fee to £526 with effect from 13 July 2026 — a rise of 75%, still flat-rate, still indifferent to whether the estate is worth £6,000 or £6 million. The banding argument has not been reopened.
It is worth keeping the history in mind when reading current coverage of probate costs. The court fee is a small fraction of the bill for any non-trivial estate. The argument about whether it should be larger has been had twice, in living memory, and resolved against the larger number.
The fee that arrived instead
What changed in November 2025 was less visible and more consequential. The Court and Public Guardian Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2025 raised the fee for a copy of a probate document naming a specific individual from £1.50 to £16.00 — a rise of more than ten times, and not an inflation uplift. The Ministry of Justice justified it as cost recovery, on HMCTS's own estimate that a single copy costs £16 to provide.
An estate with twelve banks and brokers, each requiring its own sealed copy, saw that line of the disbursement bill go from £18 to £192 overnight.
Whether a copy fee set at the registry's own estimate of its cost raises the same objection is a narrower question than the one that defeated the £6,000 idea, and a much less interesting one. Cost recovery was the principle the Joint Committee applied. This time the Ministry brought a cost figure to it.
The £16 has since been split rather than withdrawn. From 13 July 2026 a copy requested with the grant application costs £2.00, and a copy requested after the grant has issued still costs £16.00. The twelve-institution estate above now pays £24 if it orders in time and £192 if it does not.