Our Fees
How we charge for our work
The information is of necessity expressed in ranges of charges or averages which are not specific to any particular case. If you want costs information relating to your case and circumstances we suggest that you contact us and we will provide an estimate for you.
Costs Information in relation to some of our services*¹
Terminology
When we talk about ‘our fees’ these are fees we charge for providing advice and professional services, and arranging telegraphic transfers from our bank.
‘Disbursements’ are expenses we incur on your behalf, where the payments go to someone else.
‘Recharges’ are expenses incurred in the course of acting for you such as search fees or AML/identification searches.
Value Added Tax
All of our fees are subject to VAT at the standard rate, currently 20%.
In some instance we are also obliged to charge VAT on expenses.
Referral fees
We do not pay any third party to recommend our services.
Residential Conveyancing
To make life easier for you, we have simplified the way in which you can obtain a free quotation online. Our quotation is completely transparent and will provide you with a thorough breakdown of your anticipated legal costs (and disbursement costs). With access to our helpful guides below, and the GOV.UK Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) calculator, you can be in control of your finances from the very start, and you don’t need to get in touch with us until you are ready.
As a general guide:
Transaction Value | Freehold Sale and Purchase + VAT at 20% |
Up to £200,000 | £1,250 |
£200,001 – £300,000 | £1,350 |
£300,001 – £400,000 | £1,450 |
£400,001 – £500,000 | £1,550 |
£500,001 – £600,000 | £1,750 |
£600,001 – £700,000 | £1,950 |
£700,001 – £800,000 | £2,100 |
£800,001 – £900,000 | £2,200 |
£900,001 – £950,000 | £2,300 |
£950,001 – £1million | £2,500 |
£1million – £2million | 0.25% |
£2million + (POA) | 0.30% |
For Leasehold transactions, due to the transaction involving quite a lot of additional work, we add £500.00 to each transaction as quoted.
Sale Freehold
Sale price: £295,000.00
Tassells’ fees
Sale fees: £1,350.00
Bank transfer: (say two required) £100.00
VAT: £290.00
TOTAL: £1,740.00
Disbursements & recharges
Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name
VAT: £6.00
Office Copy Entries: £8.00
Office Copy Filed Doc: £3.00
Mortgage fee (if required) : £150:00 plus VAT £30.00
TOTAL: £227.00
Work to be undertaken (sale):
- examining your title
- preparing a contract
- dealing with buyer’s pre-contract enquiries
- attending to exchange of contracts
- attending to completion of the sale
- discharging your mortgage(s) and accounting to you with the net proceeds
- advising you throughout on these steps
Sale Leasehold
Sale price: £295,000.00
Tassells’ fees
Sale fees: £1,850.00
Bank transfer: (say two required) £100.00
VAT: £390.00
TOTAL: £2,340.00
Disbursements & recharges
Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name
VAT: £6.00
Office Copy Entries: £18.00
Mortgage fee (if required) : £150:00 plus VAT £30.00
Management information (1): (say) £250.00
VAT: £50.00
*NB the costs of obtaining management information vary significantly, in addition the seller may have to bear costs connected with consent to sell, deeds of covenant and compliance certificates.
TOTAL: £534.00
Work to be undertaken (sale):
- examining your title including the lease
- preparing a contract
- dealing with buyer’s pre-contract enquiries
- obtaining management information from the freeholder and/or management company
- attending to exchange of contracts
- attending to completion of the sale
- discharging your mortgage(s) and accounting to you with the net proceeds
- advising you throughout on these steps
Purchase Freehold
Purchase Price: £295,000.00
Tassells’ fees
Purchase fees: £1,350.00
Bank transfer fee: (say one required) £50.00
VAT: £280.00
TOTAL: £1,68.00
Disbursements & recharges
Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
Search Package (Local Authority Search, Drainage Search & Environmental & Flood Search): £200:00 plus VAT £40.00
Land Registry fee: £150.00
Bankruptcy Search fee: £7.00 plus VAT £1.40
Source of Funds: £15.00 plus VAT £3.00
Land Registry Search fee: £8.00 plus VAT £1.60
Stamp Duty Land Tax:
Mortgage fee: £150.00 plus VAT £30.00
TOTAL: £642.00
Work to be undertaken (purchase):
- considering the title
- raising enquiries and carrying preliminary searches
- reporting to you and dealing with exchange of contracts
- dealing with your mortgage lender’s requirements
- attending to completion
- filing a Stamp Duty Land Tax Return and any paying any tax on your behalf
- registering your purchase at HM Land Registry
- advising you throughout on these steps
Purchase Leasehold
Purchase Price: £295,000.00
Tassells’ fees
Purchase fees: £1,850.00
Bank transfer fee: (say one required) £50.00
VAT: £380.00
TOTAL: £2,280.00
Disbursements & recharges
Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
Search Package (Local Authority Search, Drainage Search & Environmental & Flood Search): £200:00 plus VAT £40.00
Land Registry fee: £150.00
Bankruptcy Search fee: £7.00 plus VAT £1.40
Source of Funds: £15.00 plus VAT £3.00
Land Registry Search fee: £8.00 plus VAT £1.60
Stamp Duty Land Tax:
Notice of transfer fee (1): £80.00 inc VAT
(1) Notice of Transfer fees vary from lease to lease, and in addition the buyer may have to bear costs connected with consent to sell, deeds of covenant and compliance certificates.
TOTAL: £542.00
Work to be undertaken (purchase):
- considering the title and the lease
- raising enquiries and carrying preliminary searches
- reporting to you and dealing with exchange of contracts
- dealing with your mortgage lender’s requirements
- attending to completion
- filing a Stamp Duty Land Tax Return and any paying any TAX on your behalf
- registering your purchase at HM Land Registry
- advising you throughout on these steps
Remortgage
New loan: £250,000.00
Tassells’ fees
Transaction fees: £750.00
Bank transfer fee: (say two required) £100.00
VAT: £170.00
TOTAL: £1,020.00
Disbursements & recharges
Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
Office Copy Entries: £8.00 plus VAT £1.60
Search Package (Local Authority Search, Drainage Search & Environmental & Flood Search): £200:00 plus VAT £40.00
Land Registry fee: £20.00
Bankruptcy Search fees: £7.00 plus VAT £1.40, per name
Source of Funds: £15.00 plus VAT £3.00, per name
Land Registry Search fee: £8.00 plus VAT £1.60
*in some instance these searches may be omitted and replaced by less costly insurance
TOTAL: £341.60
Work to be undertaken (purchase):
- considering the title (and the lease if applicable)
- raising enquiries and carrying preliminary searches
- reporting to you and dealing with exchange of contracts
- dealing with your mortgage lender’s requirements
- attending to completion
- registering the mortgage at HM Land Registry
- advising you throughout on these steps
How long will the work take?
In most cases the work can be undertaken in between 6 and 12 weeks of confirmation of our instructions. There are often matters beyond our control, for example the timing of mortgage offers and the consequences of conveyancing ‘chains’. We will always seek to work within your preferred timescale.
Taxation
When purchasing a property the buyer may have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax, for official guidance and an online calculator see: gov.uk/stamp-duty-land-tax. The rules are complex and the illustrations provided assume that the buyer will not be subject to the 3% surcharge. We will provide further advice in relation to Stamp Duty Land Tax liability once we understand your specific circumstances.
When selling a property the seller may incur Capital Gains Tax for official guidance and an online calculator see: gov.uk/money/capital-gains-tax. We will not provide advice in relation to Capital Gains Tax liability unless you ask for this. The fees for any advice provided will not form part of the fee for providing conveyancing services and will be an additional cost to you.
Administration of Estates
We offer a wide range of advice and assistance not limited to the details given here, please do contact us for more information. In these paragraphs we give you a guide to our charges relating to the administration of an estate where all the assets are in the UK and there is no argument about the Will or the shares in the estate.
If your matter is more complex, involves or might involve an argument, we shall need to discuss the detail with you before we can say what advice and legal steps will be needed and what the likely overall cost may be. Please do contact us.
It is important to stress at the outset that in the vast majority of cases, the work that we do and the charges that we make are payable by the estate, not by you personally. For our ‘application only’ services, we will expect you to pay, but you will be able to reclaim that sum from the estate when you have collected the assets.
Our lawyers are qualified solicitors and Legal Executives and the head of department is a Trusts and Estates Practitioner (member of the Society of Trusts and Estate Practitioners). Please see profile: Alexandra Gordon.
Initial contact
When you telephone to make an enquiry, our ‘Private Client’ secretaries would normally speak to you to take brief details and can usually arrange an appointment for you to see one of our lawyers. If there is a dispute, we shall run checks to confirm that we would not be put in a position of potential conflict of interest. If we tell you that we cannot advise you, it is not through discourtesy, but we will not be able to explain why, or say anything further. For this reason, the details you give at this stage will be limited.
If we are holding the Will, we may show you a copy if you are entitled to see it. A Will is confidential until death and then, only the executors may see it. If an executor wants to collect the original Will from us, we shall need the death certificate and the consent of all executors before we can release it.
If you would like some advice about the administration, or advice about the validity of the Will or what happens in the absence of a Will, we can arrange for you to meet with one of our lawyers. We shall ask you to bring a death certificate, and documents to prove your own identity, along with any other relevant information about the estate.
Instructing us
If you ask us to act for you in the administration, or to prepare the application for the Grant for you, we shall send you a letter with detailed costs information so you will know what to expect in terms of charges from the outset. We would normally ask you to sign and return that initial letter before we start work.
Taxes
If the estate is likely to be liable to pay Inheritance Tax, the amount will be calculated in accordance with the tax regulations in force at the time of the death. The regulations can be complex, an overview and guidance, however, is available on gov.uk website. There may be other taxes to pay or Inheritance tax to pay because of a pre-existing trust, or tax to pay because the deceased had made substantial gifts during the previous seven years.
Application for Grant: Limited Service
We offer a limited ‘application only’ service to assist you in making the application for a Grant. For this service, we rely on your investigation of the assets and the figures you produce, and on you to deliver any additional certificates that may be needed (for example, death certificates of a predeceased spouse, and the marriage certificate). We prepare the application documents based on the information you provide us and make the application. We then deliver the Grant to you for you to take the necessary steps in the administration.
We have two charges for this work based on what type of application is needed. There are excepted and non-excepted estates which require different routes of application. If the estate is an excepted estate (normally meaning it is not liable for Inheritance Tax) our charge is £2,500; if the estate is outside the excepted estate limits then our charges will be between £3,000-£5,000; in both cases there will also be charges made by the court for the application for the Grant. There are occasions when a non-taxable estate will not fall into an excepted estate and we will advise you as soon as we know if this is the case. At our initial meeting we will explain the difference in full and assess which application is required. The above charges are exclusive of VAT and disbursements.
We are happy to carry out additional work if you request it. We would apply our hourly rates and would give you an estimate of the likely overall charge at the time of your request.
The way that applications are made has recently been changed but it is likely that there will be a transition period during which the new requirements will be clarified, and old style applications will still be acceptable.
From Start to Finish
You may want simply to leave the papers with us, in the knowledge that we are trained in the work, and backed by reputable insurers and regulators.
We would then expect to carry out all the steps that are needed to administer the estate. So this may begin with registration of the death and organising the funeral and searching for a Will (or a later Will) to confirm that you have the necessary authority to instruct us, and continue through securing the property and arranging insurance, dealing with HMRC, DWP, and other organisations, valuing and later collecting the assets, calculating and organising the payment of Inheritance Tax, dealing with income tax matters of the deceased and the estate; identifying the beneficiaries, advertising for creditors and arranging suitable protection for our clients the executors, producing the accounts for the estate, organising the distribution following approval of the accounts, and finally to winding up the estate.
At a number of stages, the process may become complicated in a way that was not expected at the outset. This may include beneficiaries who go missing, assets that change in value, assets that need maintenance (such as visiting, or repair work commissioned), investigations by DWP if too much benefit has been paid, challenges by HMRC if valuations are controversial, and challenges from disappointed beneficiaries. If this happens, we will do our best to make estimates and will advise you of the next steps, including the likely costs.
Charges
Our charges have two main elements: the time it takes to deal with the administration; and the total value that we are dealing with; we may provide you with extra service. We charge a fee of £10 plus VAT for up to 5 beneficiaries payments.
In addition to our charges, there are likely to be charges that other people or institutions make for the steps we need to take. We call these ‘disbursements’.
Time
Time is charged by reference to hourly rates which for a Solicitor of more than five years’ experience, £330 an hour, for a Solicitor with less than five years’ experience, £240 an hour and Paralegals/Legal Assistant £180 an hour.
We make a careful record of the time and the activity we spend on the administration. The time spent, including telephone communication, is recorded on our file. Letters and emails are recorded as a single item of post. Outgoing post is charged at a tenth of an hour (so, £33 for an hourly rate of £330). Incoming post is charged at a twentieth of an hour (so, £16.50 for an hourly rate of £330).
We produce a time sheet of the detail of the work so that you can see the steps and a breakdown of the cost.
Value
We make a charge based on the value of an estate, in line with the Law Society’s guidelines, though we charge less than the suggested range of 1-1.5%.
Our charge is 0.75% (*1.5%) of the value of the gross estate passing under the Grant, so it would not normally apply to joint property, subject to a minimum of £500. Value charges are subject to VAT which we collect in addition to the sum charged.
For estates over £2m, the charge is 0.5% (*1%) for sums in excess of £2m, and 0.75% (*1.5%) for sums up to £2m.
For estate over £5m, the charge is 0.25% (*0.5%) for sums in excess of £5m plus 0.5% (*1%) between £2m and £5m and 0.75% (*1.5%) up to £5m.
*Where Tassells is acting as a professional executor.
Fees and Disbursements:
Probate Court Fee; currently the court makes charges for applications made by us at £526 plus £2 for each sealed copy Grant (no VAT applies).
Overall Costs
It is very difficult to estimate how long it may take to deal with an estate, there are a number of variables involved. In our experience, however, we observe these broad trends: an estate within the excepted estates limit might take between 12-20 hours to complete; one outside of those limits (which is always the case if there is Inheritance Tax to pay) is likely to take at least 20 hours, probably up to 40 hours, but occasionally as many as 80 hours to complete.
We will give you an overall time estimate in terms of duration when we write our initial letter to you.
Disbursements & Recharges
In addition to our charges, these are the usual expenses that may be charged by other people for the steps we need to take on your behalf, some of which may not be necessary:
- Probate Court fee; currently the court makes charges for applications made by us at £526 plus £2 for each sealed copy Grant requested with the probate application; copies requested later cost £16. (no VAT applies).
- Statutory Adverts; advertising for creditors to make themselves known, these are taken out to protect executors, and cost approximately £240 including VAT
- Bankruptcy Searches; taken out to protect the executors from mistakenly handing money to a bankrupt beneficiary, instead of their Trustee, £7 plus VAT £1.40 per person.
- Searches for missing Wills; through “Certainty” from £90 – £200 plus VAT
- Valuation fees; of the assets in the estate, which are likely to range between £400 – £2,000 plus VAT depending very much on the asset and its complexity
- Insurance policies; for the assets or to protect the executors if beneficiaries are missing. Buildings insurance varies with the state and site of the house but may be £400-800 a year, say. Policies to protect against claims from missing beneficiaries are specialist and we would need to request figures on your behalf.
- Thirdfort ID Verification: £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
VAT will be added to all vatable charges at the rate that applies when the work is done; the present VAT rate is 20%.
We review our charging rates annually and would contact you if any change in rates will affect the work we are doing for you.
Worked examples
‘Application only’
Excepted estate (usually means where there is no Inheritance Tax to pay): we will charge £2,500 plus VAT which will exclude any identity checks we need to make. We will ask you to pay in addition;
- the court fee (currently £526) and £2 for each copy of the Grant you would like to have.
Outside of the excepted estate limits (always the case where there is Inheritance Tax to pay and in some cases where there is no Inheritance Tax): we will charge between £3,000-£5,000 plus VAT which will include any identity checks we need to make. The Inheritance Tax will be payable before the application for the Grant can be made. Most banks and investment companies will make payments to HMRC or supply a cheque for that purpose, out of the assets of the estate.
We will ask you to pay in addition:
the court fee (currently £526) and £2 for each copy of the Grant you would like to have.
‘Start to finish’
Excepted estate (usually means where there is no Inheritance Tax to pay): charging between £180-£330 plus VAT an hour, where there are no arguments and no overseas assets, and a worth about £300,000, and taking 12 hours to complete overall, we would charge:
- Our time at 12 x £330 = £3,960 plus VAT
- Value at 0.75% of £300,000 = £2,250 plus VAT
So ‘legal fees’ would be £6,210 plus VAT and £50 plus VAT for each bank transfer required, with ‘disbursements’ in addition:
- Thirdfort ID Verification at £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
- Bankruptcy checks at £7 plus VAT £1.40 per person
- the court fee (currently £526) and £2 for each additional copy of the Grant
We would advise you on the need for other disbursements at the time, but this is likely to include a search for a Will (about £200) and advertising for creditors (another £200).
We emphasise that these costs are payable from the estate and any payment you make on behalf of the estate should be repaid to you.
Outside of the excepted estate limits (always the case where there is Inheritance Tax to pay): charging £330 plus VAT an hour, again, where there are no arguments and no assets overseas, worth say £2,500,000, and taking 35 hours to complete we would charge:
- Our time at 35 x £180 = £6,300 plus VAT or 35 x £330 = £11,550 plus VAT
- Value at 0.75% for the first £2m = £15,000 plus VAT
- Value at 0.5% for the next £500,000 = £2,500 plus VAT
So, ‘legal fees’ would be £23,800 to £29,050 plus VAT and £50 plus VAT for each bank transfer required, with ‘disbursements’ in addition being:
- Thirdfort ID Verification at £30.00 per name plus VAT £6.00
- Bankruptcy checks at £7 plus VAT £1.40 per person
- the court fee (currently £526) and £2 for each additional copy of the Grant
We would advise you on the need for other disbursements at the time, but this is likely to include a search for a Will (about £200) and advertising for creditors (another £200).
In addition to these charges, Inheritance Tax due would be calculated in line with the tax rules that apply at the time.
How long will the work take?
We would expect to complete ‘grant only work’ within 6 to 12 weeks of confirmation of our instructions, though the time the Court and HMRC take may significantly increase this time estimate.
The full administration of an estate can take between 6 and 18 months, or longer in some cases.