Probate house clearance in London & the South East
Clearing a parent’s house is not a removals job with a sad backstory. It sits inside a legal process, it happens in a fixed order, and the order is what protects you. This page is the whole of it, what to do first, what a probate firm is supposed to do, and what to check before you let anyone through the door.
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A probate clearance is sorting, not shifting. Paperwork, photographs and anything of value are set aside before work starts, and the contents are assessed for the estate rather than quietly taken away.
Every firm is checked against the Environment Agency register, insured to at least £2m, and asked for references we actually call. Your job goes to a maximum of three of them.
What a probate & estate clearance includes
- All labour and the vehicle
- Licensed disposal, with a waste transfer note for your records
- Dismantling furniture where it will not fit through the door
- Sweeping through afterwards, left broom-clean
- Resale value on good furniture offset against your price
- Donation to charity of anything usable, receipts on request
Probate & estate clearance prices
| Property | Typical range | Time on site |
|---|---|---|
| 1-bed flat | £420 – £580 | Half a day |
| 2-bed house or flat | £650 – £895 | Half to a full day |
| 3-bed house | £940 – £1,300 | About a day |
| 4-bed house | £1,255 – £1,730 | One to two days |
| 5-bed or larger | £1,625 – £2,240 | Two to three days |
London ranges. Prices outside London typically run 8–14% lower.
Estimate this jobHow a probate clearance actually runs
Almost every problem executors hit comes from doing step five before step two. Nothing here needs to be rushed.
- 1Secure the house, and tell the insurer
Locks, post, heating left on enough to stop pipes freezing. Then ring the insurer: most home policies restrict or void cover once a property has been unoccupied for 30 to 60 days, and it is the executor who carries that. It is usually a phone call and an endorsement, not a new policy.
- 2Find the paperwork before it gets boxed
Will, deeds, share certificates, premium bonds, pension and insurance correspondence, recent bank post. This is the single most common thing lost in a clearance, and it is lost in the first hour, not the last.
- 3Photograph every room before anything moves
Including inside wardrobes, the loft, the garage and the shed. It takes twenty minutes on a phone. It is your evidence of what was there, it settles family disagreements before they start, and HMRC accepts it as a record.
- 4Let the family name what they want kept
In writing, then labelled in the house. Verbal claims made across a kitchen table three weeks earlier are how families fall out permanently.
- 5Get anything potentially valuable looked at
Not the kettle. Jewellery, watches, art, antiques, militaria, ceramics, tools, anything you would hesitate to price. A written valuation is what protects you personally if the figure is ever questioned.
- 6Only then book the clearance
With a firm whose waste carrier registration you have checked yourself. By this point the house holds nothing you cannot account for, so the clearance is simply the last mechanical step rather than the risky one.
What a probate firm does that a rubbish removal firm does not
Any two men and a van can empty a house. These are the things that separate a firm that works probate from one that does not, and the things we check before a firm is allowed to quote you.
A room-by-room record of what was in the property, photographed, handed to the estate. You need it for HMRC and you need it for the family.
Documents, photographs, letters, medals, jewellery and anything personal are boxed and given to you, not found in a skip afterwards. Good firms assume anything paper is important until told otherwise.
Contents belong to the estate, not to the firm clearing it. A probate firm shows the resale offset as a line in the quote. A firm that says "we’ll take the furniture off your hands" is quietly buying the estate’s assets.
Where the estate has one, the firm should take direction from them without being chased, and copy them on the paperwork.
Financial and medical records shredded rather than tipped, with a certificate if you want one. A deceased person’s identity is worth money to the wrong people, and an empty house gets broken into.
Roughly a third of probate clearances are run by someone who lives too far away to attend. Walk-through on a video call, photographs as each room is finished, paperwork by email.
A transfer note and a receipt showing the firm’s registration number. Keeping that, and the number itself, is how you evidence that you took reasonable measures if the waste is ever traced back to the property.
Swept through, broom-clean, ready for vacant possession. If the sale needs a deeper clean, the firm should say so up front rather than after.
What HMRC actually expects, and what it does not
For inheritance tax the personal representative must include the deceased’s household and personal goods at their open market value on the date of death , what they would have fetched between a willing buyer and a willing seller on that day. Not insurance replacement value, and not what they cost.
In practice that figure is modest for most homes. HMRC does not require a professional valuation for ordinary household goods where you can estimate the value from publicly available data, what the item would realistically have fetched at auction or advertised publicly. The obligation is to be honest and reasonable, not to itemise a cutlery drawer.
It changes where there is something genuinely valuable. HMRC advises getting a professional valuation for any item you think may be worth more than £1,500, or where you simply are not sure. That is guidance rather than a legal threshold, but it is the sensible line to work to: the personal representative is personally accountable for an account that turns out to be wrong. Jewellery, art, antiques, watches, cars and period furniture are the usual candidates.
Being an "excepted estate" does not change any of this. It removes the duty to report to HMRC; it does not remove the duty to value the estate properly.
Can you clear the house before the grant comes through?
Partly, and the distinction matters. Securing the property, emptying the fridge, dealing with perishables and removing genuine rubbish is normal and often necessary long before any grant is issued. Nobody expects an executor to leave food in a house for months.
Disposing of anything with value is different, and the official guidance is to wait: gov.uk tells personal representatives not to make financial plans or put property on the market until probate is granted. If a beneficiary later disputes what happened to the contents, the person who authorised the clearance is the one answering for it.
Waiting is rarely as long as people fear. On the most recent published court figures, half of all grants are issued within about a week and the average is around five weeks, but an application that gets stopped for a query averages about fourteen, which is the case for getting the paperwork right first time.
The workable middle is the one good firms already use: inventory and photograph everything, remove what is plainly waste, box and store what is personal, and leave anything of value in place or in storage until the paperwork catches up. Where a property is being sold, clearance usually happens in the week or so before completion.
The two-minute check that transfers the risk off you
A house clearance firm taking away someone else’s waste needs an upper tier waste carrier registration with the Environment Agency. The number starts with the letters CBDU, the register is public, and it is free to search by name, postcode or number. If a firm will not give you its number, that is the end of the conversation.
This is not paperwork for its own sake. The law expects the person handing over waste to take reasonable measures to check it is going to someone authorised. If waste is later traced back and you cannot show you checked, a council can issue a fixed penalty, councils set their own figure within a statutory range of £150 to £600, defaulting to £200 where none is set, and prosecution carries an unlimited fine.
Checking takes about two minutes and it is the single cheapest thing you can do to protect the estate. Note the CBDU number, search it on the register, and keep the firm’s receipt. Every firm on ClearSorted is checked against that register and asked for proof of public liability insurance before it is allowed to quote you, but re-check any of them yourself. We would rather you did.
The executor’s clearance checklist
In this order. Most problems come from doing six before three.
- Secure the property and tell the insurer it is unoccupied
- Find the will, deeds, policies, share certificates and recent post
- Photograph every room, including wardrobes, loft and garage
- Ask the family to name what they want kept, then label it
- Get anything potentially valuable looked at, in writing
- Cancel utilities, redirect post, take meter readings
- Search the firm’s CBDU number on the Environment Agency register yourself
- Book the clearance, with the resale offset written into the quote
- Keep the receipt, the CBDU number and any donation receipts
Probate & estate clearance in London
Probate & estate clearance in Berkshire & Buckinghamshire
Probate & estate clearance in Hertfordshire
Probate & estate clearance in Sussex & Bedfordshire
Common questions
Who pays for a probate clearance?
What if something valuable turns up after the house is cleared?
We live hours away. Can this be done without us there?
The house was hoarded. Is that a different job?
Can we be there while it happens?
How much does probate & estate clearance cost in London?
Can we clear the house before probate is granted?
How quickly can it be done?
What happens to everything that is taken?
Is ClearSorted free to use?
Do you cover the whole of London?
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