How to Become a Will Writer in England and Wales

In England and Wales you can charge a stranger to write their will tomorrow morning with no qualification, no licence and no regulator. That is not a loophole or an oversight. Parliament looked at the question, and then looked at it again, and left the position as it is.

Understanding why is the first thing anyone entering this work needs to get straight, because it determines what your credentials are actually for, where your liability sits, and which part of the job you are not allowed to do.

The six activities that are reserved

The Legal Services Act 2007 does not regulate lawyers as a profession. It regulates six specific activities, listed in Schedule 2 of the Act, which may only be carried on by someone authorised to do so. They are:

• Rights of audience — appearing before and addressing a court, including calling and examining witnesses.
• Conduct of litigation — issuing proceedings, prosecuting and defending them, and the functions that go with them.
• Reserved instrument activities — preparing transfers and charges for Land Registration Act purposes, lodging documents for registration, and preparing other instruments relating to real or personal estate.
• Probate activities — preparing probate papers, which the Act defines as the papers on which a grant of probate or a grant of letters of administration is founded or opposed.
• Notarial activities — the work customarily carried on by an enrolled notary.
• Administration of oaths — exercising the powers of a commissioner for oaths.

Drafting a will is not on that list. More pointedly, Schedule 2 specifically excludes a will or other testamentary instrument from the definition of an instrument for the purposes of the reserved instrument activities. The exclusion is express. Parliament did not forget wills; it wrote them out.

The line that matters: the will is open, the grant is not

This is the distinction that catches new entrants out. Writing the will is unregulated. Preparing the papers that found an application for a grant of probate or letters of administration is a reserved activity, and carrying on a reserved activity without authorisation is a criminal offence, not a disciplinary matter.

So an unregulated will writer can take instructions, advise on structure, draft the document and supervise its execution, and then cannot offer to take the estate through the grant as part of the service. Estate administration more broadly was looked at separately and was not brought into regulation, which leaves a genuinely blurred edge: some administration tasks touch the preparation of probate papers and some do not, and the regulators' published material does not resolve where exactly the line falls. If your intended business model includes post-death work, get advice on that boundary specifically rather than assuming. Our guide to probate and estate administration risk covers how regulated firms handle the same exposure.

The 2013 decision that kept it this way

The Legal Services Board investigated whether will writing, estate administration and probate should be regulated, and reached three different answers. It concluded that will-writing activities should be regulated, on the basis that consumers using them faced significant risk. It did not recommend regulating estate administration. On probate, it found no evidence that the existing position should change.

The Board made a formal recommendation to the Lord Chancellor in February 2013 that all will-writing activities be brought into regulation. He declined to accept it in May of the same year. That decision is why a self-regulated, voluntary market is what exists today, and why every credential described below is something you choose rather than something you need.

What the voluntary bodies offer

Three organisations occupy the space. They are not regulators in the statutory sense, whatever the language on their websites suggests, but membership of one is the only external signal most will-writing clients will ever see.

The Society of Will Writers describes itself as a non-profit self-regulatory body that vets practitioners through membership requirements, proficiency standards and ongoing training. Its published route runs three ways: take the Society's will writing course and the exam attached to it; sit the entrance exam alone if you already have relevant experience; or be admitted without examination where you can demonstrate adequate experience, subject to the Society's approval.

Two features of its model are worth noting before you apply. It requires proof of professional indemnity insurance, and the minimum level of cover it has published is £2 million — confirm the current figure with the Society directly, because the published guidance predates 2020. And it regulates the individual rather than the company, which means membership does not travel to colleagues at the same firm and does not cover work done by anyone who is not themselves a member. Members sign a declaration agreeing to be bound by its code of practice, and submit an annual audit covering contact details, storage arrangements and continuing professional development. Complaints go to the Society directly, though its own guidance is candid that it may be unable to help where the person complained about is not a member.

The Institute of Professional Willwriters operates a comparable membership and code model. STEP, the body for trust and estate practitioners, introduced its own will-writing code of practice in 2014, explicitly to fill the gap the Lord Chancellor's decision had left. The code covered mental capacity, conflicts of interest — including the drafter being a beneficiary — the appropriate qualification for taking will instructions, indemnity insurance, and service factors such as the time a job should take.

Which qualification is worth doing

It depends entirely on where you want to end up, because the three routes lead to different places.

If you intend to run a standalone will-writing practice serving straightforward estates, a Society of Will Writers or IPW course and membership is proportionate. It is quick, it is specific to the work, and it gives you the insurance and code framework that a client-facing business needs from day one.

If you want to work with substantial or complex estates, trusts, cross-border assets or business property, STEP is the credential the market recognises, and the TEP designation carries weight with professional introducers in a way that will-writing membership does not. It is a far longer commitment. Our guide to the STEP Diploma and TEP membership sets out the structure.

If you want to be able to do the reserved work as well — the grant application, and the wider private client caseload around it — then you need an authorised qualification rather than a voluntary one, and the CILEX route to chartered legal executive is the usual way in without a law degree. That is a qualification in law, not in will writing, and it changes what you are permitted to do rather than only how you are perceived.

The practical read

An unregulated market cuts both ways. Entry is genuinely open, which is unusual in legal services and is the real opportunity here. But there is no regulator standing between you and a negligence claim, no compensation fund behind you, and no professional body that can be blamed when a badly drafted will fails after the testator has died and cannot clarify anything. The insurance is not a formality; it is the whole of your protection.

Which is the argument for qualifying properly even though nobody will make you. In a market where the credential is optional, holding one is the differentiator rather than the entry ticket.

If the reserved work is what you want rather than the drafting alone, the funded route into it is worth comparing: our guide to the solicitor apprenticeship sets out what it costs, how long it takes and the age restriction that now applies to its funding.