Estate planning guides
In-depth guides on inheritance tax, gifting, trusts, wills, business succession, and probate. Each piece covers how the rules actually work under current legislation, worked examples, and where useful an interactive calculator. Skip to the guide that matches your situation.
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Inheritance Tax in the UK: The Complete Guide
Inheritance tax is charged at 40% on the value of an estate above the available allowances. Each person has a £325,000 nil-rate band, frozen since 2009, plus a £175,000 residence nil-rate band where a home passes to direct descendants. Transfers between spouses or civil partners are exempt, and unused allowances pass to the survivor, so a couple can pass on up to £1m before inheritance tax in the right circumstances. The residence band tapers away by £1 for every £2 the estate exceeds £2m. The rate falls to 36% where at least 10% of the net estate is left to charity. A matched specialist models your actual exposure and the steps that reduce it.
Lifetime Gifting and the Seven-Year Rule
You can give £3,000 each tax year under the annual exemption, with one year carried forward, plus unlimited small gifts of £250 per person and certain wedding gifts, all immediately exempt. Larger gifts to individuals are potentially exempt transfers: they fall fully outside your estate if you survive seven years, with taper relief reducing the tax (not the gift) on a sliding scale once you have survived three years. Regular gifts out of surplus income can be immediately exempt if they are part of your normal expenditure and properly evidenced. A specialist helps you use these without leaving yourself short.
Trusts in Estate Planning: A Complete Guide
Not everyone does. Trusts are useful for controlling when and how beneficiaries receive assets, for young or vulnerable beneficiaries, for protection against divorce or bankruptcy, and for second marriages and blended families. They can help with inheritance tax, but they carry their own tax and administration, including potential entry charges, periodic ten-year charges of up to 6%, exit charges, registration with HMRC and trust tax returns. A matched specialist will tell you honestly whether a trust adds enough to justify the cost, or whether simpler tools achieve your aim.
Business Relief, Agricultural Relief and Succession Planning
From 6 April 2026, the 100% rate of Business Relief and Agricultural Relief is capped: the combined value qualifying for 100% relief is limited to £1m per person, with the excess relieved at only 50%. For larger farms and family businesses that previously passed almost free of inheritance tax, this can create a real charge on succession for the first time in years, payable potentially over ten annual instalments. Planning responses include using both spouses’ allowances, lifetime transfers of shares, restructuring, and life cover to fund the bill so the business need not be sold. The change makes specialist succession planning materially more valuable and more time-sensitive.
Wills and Estate Structuring Explained
A will says who inherits and appoints your executors, and is drafted by a solicitor. Estate planning is the wider work of arranging ownership, gifts, trusts, pensions and reliefs so that what you leave passes efficiently and with as little inheritance tax as possible. The two work together: a matched accountant handles the tax and structuring, makes sure the will uses the spouse exemption and both nil-rate bands efficiently and does not accidentally lose the residence nil-rate band, and coordinates with your solicitor so the tax consequences are right before the will is signed.
Probate and Estate Administration: An Executor’s Guide
Executors identify and value everything the deceased owned and owed, work out and report any inheritance tax to HMRC, pay it, apply for the grant of probate, then collect in the assets, settle debts and distribute to the beneficiaries, keeping estate accounts throughout. Inheritance tax is generally due by the end of the sixth month after the month of death, often before probate releases the funds, which creates a cash-flow problem with instalment and direct-payment routes around it. Executors carry personal liability for getting the tax wrong, which is why many bring in an accountant for the inheritance tax account and estate accounts.
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