Probate for Accountants: When You Need an ICAEW Licence

ICAEW is an approved regulator under the Legal Services Act 2007. That means an accountancy firm can be authorised to carry out reserved probate work, in the same way a solicitors' firm is — and it also means an accountancy firm that strays into that work without authorisation is not committing a regulatory slip. Carrying on a reserved legal activity while unauthorised is a criminal offence.

Most accountants with private clients are closer to that line than they realise, because the work that sits either side of it looks identical from a client's chair.

What is actually reserved

The Legal Services Act reserves six activities. The one that matters here is probate activities, defined in Schedule 2 of the Act as preparing probate papers — the papers on which a grant of probate or a grant of letters of administration is founded or opposed.

ICAEW's current Legal Services Regulations, which took effect on 1 October 2026, put it in narrower terms still: probate work consists only of preparing papers to apply for a grant of probate or letters of administration, and under those regulations it is restricted to non-contentious matters. Once a matter becomes contentious it has to go to someone licensed for it.

Everything else an accountant typically does around a death — the inheritance tax computation, the estate accounts, the tax clearance, advice on how assets and liabilities are treated — is not a reserved activity. If you want the wider picture of which six activities are reserved and why some obvious candidates are not, we have set it out in the context of will writing, which is expressly excluded.

The sentence in the 2026 regulations that catches firms out

Here is the part worth reading twice. The regulations state that estate administration is an unreserved activity — but that when a firm engages in that work, it nonetheless falls within the definition of authorised legal services work for the purposes of the regulations.

So the test is not simply "have I prepared a probate paper". A firm doing estate administration is inside the regulated perimeter even though the administration itself is not a reserved activity. That is a wider net than most firms assume, and it is the single most important thing in the current rules for anyone offering estate work as a service line.

Where I am going to stop being definite, deliberately

You will find articles, including ones still circulating, that reproduce a detailed table of what an unlicensed accountant may and may not do — fill in the IHT400 but not submit it, help with the PA1 but not assemble the bundle, and so on. That table comes from an ICAEW regulatory advisory published in 2015 and updated in 2016, which built its boundary around whether you charge a fee and whether the process is "managed" by you rather than by the executor.

The 2026 regulations frame the same boundary differently, around the firm engaging in the work at all. Nothing published reconciles the two, and I have not been able to establish whether the 2015 advisory still represents ICAEW's position.

Which means reproducing that table here would be irresponsible. The consequence of getting this boundary wrong is criminal liability, not a letter. The advisory itself was careful to say it could not prescribe the law, only indicate the regulatory boundaries, and noted that the delineation between these activities had never been closely tested. If your firm does estate work and does not hold a licence, the right move is to put your specific facts to ICAEW and get the position confirmed, not to work from an article — including this one.

What is not in doubt is the direction of travel. When ICAEW first issued that advisory it warned members that acting outside it would attract disciplinary action, and it did so having taken legal advice, precisely because firms had been doing tax work around estates without considering whether it fell inside the rules. That concern has not gone away; the regulations have tightened around it.

How authorisation actually works

It attaches to the firm, not to you personally, and there are two routes.

An authorised firm is one where every principal is individually an authorised person. A licensed firm is one where they are not — ICAEW may license such a firm provided at least one principal is an authorised individual, or is authorised by another approved regulator, and additional requirements then apply.

Across both routes the regulations require that the firm is fit and proper, that every individual who undertakes authorised legal services work or controls the undertaking of it is an authorised individual, that there is a named contact partner, and that the firm has at least one office in England and Wales from which the work is done. A licensed firm must additionally appoint a Head of Legal Practice — approved by ICAEW in that capacity, and also the contact partner — and a Head of Finance and Administration, who should hold an appropriate qualification.

There is a hard stop built in. If a firm ceases to have any authorised individual, it must immediately stop undertaking authorised legal services work. That is not a wind-down period.

Insurance and the compensation scheme

Two obligations here are specific enough to plan around.

Professional indemnity insurance must be held under ICAEW's PII Regulations with a minimum indemnity of £500,000 per claim for authorised legal services work, and a firm may only carry out that work while it holds the cover. Separately, where the value of an estate is likely to exceed the firm's level of cover, the firm has to tell the client so in writing. For anyone handling substantial estates, that disclosure requirement is worth modelling before taking the instruction rather than after.

Firms must also tell clients about the compensation arrangements — specifically the consumer's ability to claim from ICAEW's Legal Services Compensation Scheme. That is one of the real benefits of authorisation from the client's side, and it is a reason the licensed route is a commercial proposition rather than only a compliance cost.

If the ICAEW route does not fit

It is not the only non-solicitor door into probate. The Council for Licensed Conveyancers licenses probate practitioners, and its qualification structure now runs conveyancing and probate through a single framework with the specialism as an option — including an experience route that lets long-serving fee earners skip the Level 4 stage. We have set that out in the guide to the CLC technician and licence route.

And if your interest is the risk side rather than the authorisation side — what goes wrong in estate administration and how regulated firms manage it — that is covered separately in probate and estate administration risk, alongside the SRA Accounts Rules for accountants acting for law firms.

One closing note on sourcing. Everything above about the current framework comes from the ICAEW Legal Services Regulations effective 1 October 2026, and everything about the six reserved activities from Schedule 2 of the Legal Services Act itself. Where the two bodies of material disagree about the boundary, I have said so rather than picked one. Confirm your own position with ICAEW before changing what your firm does.