This is a plain guide to how a probate house clearance works in England and Wales – what you can do straight away, what you have to wait for, and what to look for in whoever you hire.

First: who has the authority to clear the property?

Before anything leaves the house, be clear who is legally entitled to deal with the estate.

If there is a will, that is the executor named in it. If there is no will, it falls to the next of kin, who applies for letters of administration. Either way, the document confirming authority is known as a grant of representation – commonly called the grant of probate.

In practice, families often start sorting and tidying before the grant arrives, and that is usually fine for everyday items. What you should not do is dispose of, sell or give away anything of real value until authority is confirmed and the estate has been valued. If several people stand to inherit, moving valuables early is how disputes start.

If a solicitor is handling the estate, ask them directly what you can begin clearing. They will usually tell you to crack on with general contents and hold anything of worth.

Get the valuation done before the clearance

The estate’s value has to be reported to HMRC, and that includes the contents of the property – furniture, jewellery, art, collections, vehicles. This is valued at what it was worth on the date of death, not what it cost.

Most household contents are worth far less second-hand than families expect, and for a lot of estates the contents barely move the total. But if there is anything that might be genuinely valuable – antiques, jewellery, artwork, a collection – get it looked at by a valuer before it goes anywhere. Photograph it, list it, and keep the record with the probate paperwork.

A clearance firm is not a valuer. Anyone who tells you they will “value it and take it away” in the same visit has an obvious conflict of interest.

Sorting: four piles, not two

The usual advice is “keep or throw”, which is why people stall. It helps to work in four:

• Keep – paperwork, photographs, jewellery, anything sentimental. Do this pile first, before anyone else is in the house.
• Value – anything that might need a valuer or belongs in the estate accounts.
• Reusable – furniture and household goods in sound condition.
• Dispose – broken, unsafe, or genuinely finished.

Paperwork is the one people regret. Bank statements, pension letters, insurance documents, share certificates and old correspondence are easy to bin in a push and awkward to replace. Box all paperwork to one side and go through it when you are not standing in a cold house.

What to do if you genuinely cannot decide

This is the most common sticking point, and it is worth saying plainly: you do not have to decide everything in advance.

A clearance that is worth paying for works around you. If you are not sure about a room, we leave it. If you want to go through the loft yourself first, we do the rest and come back. If something turns up mid-clearance that you had forgotten existed, it gets set aside rather than loaded.

The practical version: mark the rooms or items you want left alone before the team arrives, and keep one room as a holding area for anything undecided. Nothing in that room gets touched. It is far easier to deal with one undecided pile at the end than to make forty decisions while people are carrying things past you.

What actually happens to the contents

“We donate to charity” is on every clearance website in the country, and it is usually less true than it sounds.

The reality is that charity shops are constrained by storage, not by willingness. A shop with a full back room will turn away a perfectly good three-piece suite because it has nowhere to put it until Thursday. Dark wood furniture is the hardest of all to place – sideboards, wardrobes and dining sets that were expensive when they were bought and are now very difficult to give away.

Being able to hold items and offer them on when a charity has the space to take them is the difference between furniture being reused and furniture being tipped. Anything that cannot be reused or recycled goes to a registered waste facility, and the transfer paperwork comes back to you.

That last point matters for executors specifically. As the person dealing with the estate, you want a record showing that the contents were disposed of legally. A waste transfer note is that record.

Choosing a firm: what to check

Clearance is barely regulated and the barrier to entry is a van. Before you book anyone, ask for:

• Their waste carrier licence number. You can check it for free on the Environment Agency public register. If they hesitate, stop there.
• A waste transfer note for the collection. This is your proof that the contents were taken to a licensed facility.
• A fixed price before the day. Not an hourly rate, and not an estimate that moves once the van is loaded.
• A written record of what was taken and photographs of the finished property, particularly if you live too far away to be there.

The reason this matters more for probate than for an ordinary clearance: if the estate is ever queried, by HMRC, by a beneficiary or by a solicitor, you are the one who has to account for where the contents went. Fly-tipped waste traced back to a property remains the householder’s problem, and in a probate clearance that is the estate.

We are a licensed waste carrier and issue a transfer note on every collection as standard.

Do you need a site visit, or will photos do?

For most properties, photographs and a written list are enough to give an accurate fixed price. Send room-by-room photos, include the loft hatch, the garage and the garden, and say if there is anything heavy or awkward.

Where a visit genuinely helps is when the scope will not fit in a photograph: long outbuildings, a loft that runs the length of the house, garages stacked front to back, or anything that needs dismantling before it can come out. If that sounds like the property, we will come and look rather than guess.

How long it takes, and what it costs

A two or three-bedroom house is usually a single day. Larger properties, heavily furnished homes, or clearances where the family wants to work room by room can run to two or three.

On price, most house clearances fall between £650 and £1,250 depending on the size of the property, access and what is in it. Our full price list is published rather than hidden behind a quote form.

See our clearance prices

If you are an executor or a solicitor

There is a companion piece to this one: what solicitors and executors should expect from a clearance firm.

We work across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire and London, and we are used to dealing with executors who live nowhere near the property. That means keys collected and returned, a photographic record of the finished house, and documentation that stands up if the estate is queried.

If you are handling an estate and want to know what a clearance would cost before you commit to anything, send photographs over and we will come back with a fixed figure.

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This article is general information about how probate clearances work, not legal or tax advice. If a solicitor is administering the estate, check with them before clearing or disposing of anything.