Written for whoever has been left to sort it out. It is UK-specific, and it says what actually happens rather than what ought to. If you are in the first few days, the only thing you need today is the death certificate. The rest can wait a week.
None of these are us. Use them first.
Government only, and you usually get one shot at it when you register the death. Tells HMRC, DWP, DVLA, the passport office and the council in one go. It does not tell banks.
Free, built by the banking industry. One submission notifies around forty banks and building societies. It covers banks only, not insurers, pensions, utilities or subscriptions.
Free to families, and covers the gaps the other two leave: over a thousand companies including utilities, insurers and subscriptions.
Between them these handle telling people. None of them can tell you which accounts existed in the first place, which is the part below.
There is no central register of bank accounts in the United Kingdom. If you do not know an account exists, no system will tell you. That is the single fact that makes this week harder than it needs to be, and it is worse now than it was ten years ago, because online banking means there is often no post arriving to give the game away.
What actually works, roughly in order: paperwork and any post that still arrives; the last two or three years of statements, read for payments going somewhere you do not recognise; the phone and the email account, for banking apps and notifications; then My Lost Account, which is free and covers banks, building societies and NS&I.
A sole account is frozen as soon as the bank is told. Standing orders and direct debits stop, and nobody can take money out until the bank has the paperwork it needs. A joint account normally does not freeze: it usually passes to the surviving holder, who can keep using it.
Not always. Most UK banks release smaller balances to the person dealing with the estate on a death certificate and their own forms. Each bank sets its own threshold and they vary widely, commonly somewhere between £5,000 and £50,000. Above that they will ask for a grant of probate, or confirmation in Scotland.
Slowly, and this is the hard part. There is no central register of UK bank accounts. You look through paperwork, then the last few years of statements for transfers going somewhere unexplained, then the deceased's email and phone for banking apps and notifications. My Lost Account covers banks, building societies and NS&I for free. Paid tracing services exist. None of it is quick, and it only ever finds accounts that left a trace.
On a sole account they stop when the account is frozen, which can cause its own problems if one of them was insurance on a house that now sits empty. On a joint account they keep running until someone cancels them. Subscriptions billed to a card often keep taking money for months, because nobody knows they exist.
Do not pay anything out of your own pocket, and do not start distributing money. An insolvent estate has a legal order in which debts must be paid, and getting it wrong can make you personally liable. Take advice before you move anything.
We are not a probate service and we are not lawyers. If the estate is complicated or insolvent, take proper advice. GOV.UK: what to do after someone dies is the official checklist, and Cruse Bereavement Support is there if the admin is not the hardest part of this.
Nobody wrote it down. Not out of carelessness. People assume there will be time, and that someone will know where to look, and then there is not and they do not.
You are, right now, the person best placed to know how much difference one page would have made. If You Die holds that page for you and sends it to the people you choose, but only after we have checked, repeatedly, that you are not answering, and two people you named have confirmed it. Not a will, and not a substitute for one.
One letter to one person is free, for as long as that is all you need. If it is useful, write the boring one first: where the accounts are, where the will is, who holds a key.