How Much Does a Will Cost in 2026?

Ask five different providers what they charge for a Will and you'll get five very different answers. Blank forms from WHSmith cost under 30 quid. Your local solicitor? Could be 200, could be 500 or beyond. Geography and how tangled your affairs are make all the difference. Got trusts or property abroad? Four figures isn't unusual.

Between those extremes, online providers have prised open a gap that barely existed before broadband arrived. Prices typically sit between 50 and 150 pounds for a single Will, with mirror Wills for couples coming in slightly higher but still well below what most solicitors charge.

So why the enormous variation? The answer usually comes down to three things: how complicated your affairs are, who's producing the document, and how much hand-holding is included.

At the cheapest end of the market are blank Will forms you buy from WHSmith or download online. They cost next to nothing, sometimes under 10 pounds, and they give you a basic framework to fill in yourself.

The risk? Nobody checks your work. If you phrase something ambiguously, miss a required formality, or accidentally revoke a previous Will you didn't mean to, there's no safety net. The errors only come to light when the Will goes through probate, by which point you're not around to fix them.

For someone with a very simple estate and solid confidence in their own legal understanding, a kit might do the job. For everyone else, the savings are false economy. An invalid Will ends up costing the family ten or twenty times what a properly drafted one would have cost in the first place. Not a great trade.

The traditional route. You sit across a desk from someone who's been drafting Wills for twenty years, explain your situation, and they produce a document built around your specific family and finances.

What justifies the price tag is the personal advice that comes bundled in. A good solicitor will notice things you'd miss entirely: a jointly owned property that won't pass through your Will at all, an inheritance tax issue lurking in a pension nomination, or a family situation where someone might contest what you've written. That kind of insight can save your family thousands down the line.

Numbers? They bounce around depending on geography and firm size. A one-partner practice in a market town might ask 150 to 250. Step through the door of a bigger outfit in Leeds or Bristol and that creeps up to 300 or 500 for essentially the same piece of paper. Add mirror Wills, trusts, or overseas elements and it climbs from there. Watch out for hourly billing, too: a "straightforward" Will that requires three meetings and a round of amendments can end up costing double the original estimate.

There's also the time factor. You're juggling diary appointments, face-to-face meetings, draft turnaround, and follow-up corrections. People who work nine to five and don't have a solicitor round the corner often just... put it off indefinitely.

This corner of the market has expanded rapidly because it tackles the two biggest complaints about solicitors: price and hassle. You work through questions on your laptop, make your picks for beneficiaries and executors, and get a legally valid document out the other end.

Cost? A single Will usually falls in the 50 to 150 range. Couples doing mirror Wills together get a package deal. And because the price is displayed before you click "start," there's no nasty surprise at the end when someone tots up the hours.

What you don't get is tailored legal advice. The guided questions handle standard scenarios well, but they won't spot a niche tax issue or advise on a family trust with unusual terms. For most people, a house, some savings, a pension, a partner and children, an online service more than covers what's needed. If your affairs are genuinely complex, though, a solicitor earns their higher fee.

And it's fast. Twenty minutes is a realistic estimate for a standard situation. Take your time over the decisions and it might stretch to half an hour. Either way, the document is usually available the same day.

A middle option exists: in-person Will writers who aren't qualified solicitors. Someone comes to your kitchen table, talks through what you need, and drafts the Will there and then or posts it to you shortly afterwards.

You'll pay somewhere between 100 and 300 pounds for the visit. People like the personal touch and the fact that nobody has to leave the house. The worry? These practitioners fall outside the Solicitors Regulation Authority, so there's no automatic standard of competence and no compulsory indemnity insurance backing them up. Quality varies wildly: some are genuinely good, and some really aren't. If you're considering this option, look for membership of a body like the Institute of Professional Willwriters, which at least enforces a code of practice and a complaints process.

While this guide focuses on Will costs, it's worth noting that Lasting Powers of Attorney carry their own fees. Each LPA costs 82 pounds to register through the OPG, and that comes on top of whatever the LPA itself costs to create. People on qualifying benefits can get the registration fee reduced or waived.

A handful of variables drive the final bill:

The complexity of your estate matters most. A single person with a rented flat, some savings, and no children is at the cheap end. A couple with a house, a buy-to-let, pensions, ISAs, children from different relationships, and a family business is at the other.

Whether you need trusts changes the equation significantly. A trust within a Will (to protect assets for young children, for example) adds drafting time and legal expertise.

The number of documents also plays a role. A single Will costs less than mirror Wills, which cost less than mirror Wills plus two LPAs.

Geography matters for in-person services. A Mayfair practice and a high street office in Darlington exist in different financial universes.

Compare the price of a Will against the cost of not having one, and the answer is obvious. When someone dies intestate, the costs pile up in ways that make even an expensive solicitor's bill look like small change. Legal fees for disputed estates, court-appointed administrators billing by the hour, inheritance tax triggered by poor distribution, an unmarried partner losing their home. All because nobody spent an afternoon putting their wishes in writing. The financial and emotional toll dwarfs the price of even the most expensive Will on the market.

A Will is one of those things where the cost of not having one is always higher than the cost of getting one done.

A single Will through our service costs 99 pounds, and a pair of mirror Wills is 149 pounds. Everything is fixed price: what you see on the page is what you pay, and most people are done in under twenty minutes. You can also add LPAs as part of a bundle with combined pricing.