The instrument is the Court and Public Guardian Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2025 — S.I. 2025/1126 — made on 27 October 2025 and in force on 17 November 2025. Article 3(3) substituted fee 8 in Schedule 1 to the Non-Contentious Probate Fees Order 2004, raising the charge for a copy of a document of a specific individual named in the request from £1.50 to £16.00 for each copy. That is an increase of 966.67%.
It was made under section 92 of the Courts Act 2003 and section 180(1) of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, among other powers.
There is no Non-Contentious Probate Fees (Amendment) Order 2025. That series of amending orders runs 2000 to 2021 and stops there; every probate fee change of the last three years has been made by one of the miscellaneous court-fee orders instead. Which is part of why they are so easy to miss.
It went through quietly. No public consultation was held on any measure in the Order — the Explanatory Memorandum treats moving a fee toward cost recovery as an established principle rather than a policy question.
No impact assessment was prepared for the copy fee at all. One was prepared for the power-of-attorney fees in the same instrument. For most estates, this was nonetheless the probate fee change of 2025 that actually cost money.
Why sealed copies matter
An official sealed copy of the grant of probate is the document an executor presents to each institution holding an asset of the estate. The bank, the broker, the share registrar, the foreign authority, the property registrar, the pension administrator — each typically requires its own, returned as evidence of the executor's authority to act. Photocopies are not accepted.
One sealed copy can be passed between institutions in sequence. For an estate with several institutional holders, the time cost of passing rather than presenting in parallel is rarely worth the saving.
An estate with, say, three bank accounts, two brokerage accounts, two share registrars, a pension scheme and a foreign asset will typically want nine sealed copies. Before 17 November 2025 that was £13.50. Between then and 13 July 2026 it was £144.00, however they were ordered.
Today it is £18.00 if the copies are requested in the grant application, and £144.00 if they are requested after the grant has issued. For an estate with twenty institutional holders the same decision is £40.00 against £320.00.
No single figure here is catastrophic. The gap between the two columns is the whole point.
What the uplift is for
The £1.50 was not an ancient figure. It was set on 22 July 2019 by the Court Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2019, which swept away a scale of £10.00 for the first copy and 50p for each further copy supplied at the same time, and replaced it with a flat £1.50 for every copy.
So the rate raised in November 2025 had stood for six years, not fifteen — and the order that created it had cut the price of a single copy by 85%. Read across both changes and the fee for one copy went £10.00, then £1.50, then £16.00, inside six years.
The Ministry of Justice's rationale, set out in the Explanatory Memorandum, is cost recovery on a measured basis — not an inflation uplift. HMCTS put the cost of providing a single copy through the Find a Will service at £16 per copy, and recorded that £1.50 significantly under-recovered it.
That is a specific claim with a specific number behind it, tied to the Managing Public Money principles, which is more than most fee changes come with.
The memorandum also explains why the old fee looked odd: £1.50 was doing two jobs. It priced individual copies for executors and searchers, and it priced bulk access for the organisations that take every grant and will issued in England and Wales.
The stated intention was to separate the two, with a bulk fee to follow in a later instrument. As at September 2026 that has not happened.
Fee 8(b) of the 2004 Order still reads £1.50 for each copy of a document of an individual not named in the request, supplied electronically. The bulk subscriber is therefore paying under a tenth of what an executor pays for a copy ordered after the grant.
What an executor should now do
Two adjustments. First, order every sealed copy you expect to need in the grant application itself. Since 13 July 2026 that is a real saving rather than a convenience: £2.00 a copy with the application against £16.00 a copy afterwards — eight times the price, for the same document.
Between November 2025 and July 2026 the price was identical either way, and only postage and time were saved. That is no longer the position, and advice written in that window is now advice that costs money.
Second, when budgeting executor disbursements, size the copies line against the number of institutions actually holding an asset, not against a round number. Before November 2025 that line was a rounding error. It is not now.
The July 2026 split — £2 with the application, £16 after it
The Court and Tribunal Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2026 — S.I. 2026/642 — came into force on 13 July 2026, a week later than drafted: the date was moved from 6 July by a second order made for that single purpose.
Article 3(2)(g) divided fee 8(a) in two. Where the request accompanies an application for a grant, or for a second or subsequent grant, each copy is £2.00. In any other case each copy is £16.00. The same order raised the probate application fee itself from £300 to £526.
So the £16 was never withdrawn. It was moved onto the copies an executor asks for late — which, for a family working through institutions one at a time as they discover them, is most of them.
The saving is available only to the executor who knows how many copies they will need before the grant is issued. That is exactly the thing a household inventory answers, and an unsorted drawer of paperwork does not.