Lasting Power of Attorney Guidance (UK, 2026)

A Lasting Power of Attorney is a legal document in England and Wales that lets someone you trust make decisions for you if you ever cannot. Without one, the only route is the Court of Protection: slow, expensive, and emotionally gruelling.

Most people in the UK set up both. Property and Financial covers bank accounts, pension, investments and property. Health and Welfare covers medical treatment, care home and life sustaining decisions.

To make a Lasting Power of Attorney you need to be 18 or over and able to understand what you are signing. That second part is what the law calls mental capacity, and it is the whole reason these documents exist. You make the decision now, while your mind is clear, about who steps in later if it ever is not.

Capacity is judged at the moment you sign, not by your age or any diagnosis. Plenty of people in the early stages of dementia still understand the decision well enough to set one up, and a Lasting Power of Attorney made then is completely valid. The real danger is leaving it too late. Once someone can no longer grasp what they are agreeing to, the door closes, and the only route left is the Court of Protection.

The person making the document is called the donor. That is you. The people you appoint to act for you are your attorneys, and choosing them well is the most important decision you make here.

An attorney can be anyone you trust who is 18 or over. Most people pick a spouse, an adult child, a sibling or a close friend. For a Property and Financial Lasting Power of Attorney the person cannot be bankrupt or under a debt relief order, since they will be handling your money.

You can appoint one attorney or several. If you appoint more than one, you decide how they make decisions. Jointly means they have to agree on everything and sign together. That is a safeguard, but it is slow, and it falls apart if one of them dies. Jointly and severally means any of them can act on their own, which is far more practical day to day. Most families choose jointly and severally for exactly that reason.

It is also worth naming a replacement attorney. If your first choice can no longer act, the replacement steps in and your Lasting Power of Attorney keeps working instead of collapsing. A good attorney is not automatically the eldest child or the one who lives nearest. It is the person who will actually do the job, keep your money separate from their own, and make the call you would have made.

Before a Lasting Power of Attorney can be registered, an independent person has to confirm that you understand what you are doing and that nobody has pressured you into it. This person is called the certificate provider. They can be someone who has known you well for at least two years, such as a friend or neighbour, or a professional like your GP or a solicitor. They cannot be one of your attorneys or a member of your family.

The form then has to be signed in a set order: you first, then the certificate provider, then your attorneys, each with a witness. Sign it in the wrong order and the Office of the Public Guardian sends it straight back. This is the single most common reason a self-submitted Lasting Power of Attorney gets rejected, and it is exactly what our signing pack is built to prevent. We tell you who signs what, and in what order.

A Lasting Power of Attorney is not a blank cheque handed to your attorneys. You can write in preferences, which are wishes you would like them to bear in mind, and instructions, which are rules they have to follow. You might ask to be cared for at home for as long as it is safe, or set aside a particular sum for a grandchild. Keep instructions sensible: rules that are impossible to follow can hold up the whole registration.

On a Health and Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney there is one decision that stands apart. You choose whether your attorneys can give or refuse consent to life sustaining treatment on your behalf, or whether that choice stays with your doctors. There is no right answer. It is a deeply personal call, and the form makes you face it head on. We walk you through it in plain English so you know exactly what you are agreeing to.

A signed Lasting Power of Attorney is not yet a usable one. It has to be registered with the Office of the Public Guardian first, and registration currently takes around eight to ten weeks. There is a built in waiting period during which anyone named can raise a concern. Because of that delay, the sensible move is to register as soon as it is signed, not to wait until there is a crisis and then discover you are weeks away from being able to act.

Once registered, the two types behave differently. A Health and Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney can only be used once you have lost the capacity to make the decision yourself. A Property and Financial one is more flexible. You can let your attorneys help while you still have capacity, for instance if you are in hospital and need the bills paid, or you can restrict it so it only takes effect if you lose capacity. You set that when you make the document. The full timeline, the fee and the common rejection traps are covered in our guide to registering a Lasting Power of Attorney.

Keystone prepares a Lasting Power of Attorney from £69, with a free Will worth £59 included and 25% off every extra document in the same order. A solicitor doing the identical work usually charges £300 to £600. On top of whatever you pay to have it prepared, the Office of the Public Guardian charges a £92 registration fee per document. That goes to the government, not to us, and many people qualify to pay half of it or nothing at all under the fee reduction scheme.

The full breakdown, including the maths for couples, is on our Lasting Power of Attorney cost page.

If someone close to you had a stroke this week, you could not legally touch their bank account or speak to their consultant. The only route is a Court of Protection deputyship: six months, over £1,000 in fees, ongoing court supervision for life. A Lasting Power of Attorney from Keystone for £69 avoids all of it.

If you live alone or are not married, this matters even more. No one has an automatic right to act for you, so without a Lasting Power of Attorney the decision falls to someone a court appoints.

As long as you still have mental capacity, you are free to change your mind. You cannot edit a Lasting Power of Attorney once it is made, but you can cancel it by signing a document called a deed of revocation and telling the Office of the Public Guardian, then make a fresh one that reflects what you now want. People do this after a divorce, a falling out, or simply because the person they first chose is no longer the right fit.

A Lasting Power of Attorney also ends automatically when you die. From that point your Will takes over and your executors step in, which is why the two documents work as a pair. The Power of Attorney protects you while you are alive; the Will protects the people you leave behind.