Death certificate fees are increasing

Cost of obtaining a death certificate is rising in 2019

Bereaved families are going to be hit by another price increase in 2019. The price of a death certificate is going up from February 2019. This is on top of the proposed hike in Probate Registry fees that are due to be introduced in April 2019.

The cost of an individual death certificate obtained from the General Registrar will rise from £9.25 to £11.00. That sounds like a modest increase until you realise that most financial institutions are now insisting on seeing official death certificates rather than photocopies.

If a deceased person has bank accounts, Premium Bonds, insurance policies, shares you may well have to send each financial organisation an official death certificate. You may, therefore, have the stark choice of either paying for several death certificates at a cost of £11.00 each or waiting for the same death certificate to be returned by each organisation in turn.

Expedited death certificate fee

If you need to make an urgent application to the General Registrar for a death certificate the fee is going to increase to £35 per official certificate. The new fee is in line with statutory fees for certified copies of official documents such as certified copies of registered Lasting Powers of Attorney. Nevertheless, the new increases will make researching family records or tracing missing beneficiaries more expensive.

Steps for keeping death certificate costs down

If you’re not able to attend in person to register the death get the person who is going to the District Registrar’s office to ask for at least 10 copies of the death certificate. The cost per death certificate is lower if you pay for several certified death certificates on the day.

Make sure you keep an up to date list of your assets that your family can find so they know how many death certificates they’re likely to need. It’s the additional ones ordered afterwards that cost more.

More information about General Registry fees is available at https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/

The statutory instrument introducing the fees increase can be viewed here