What the latest probate waiting times mean for a sale

What do the figures actually measure?

The Ministry of Justice publishes probate timings every quarter. For January to March 2026 the mean wait between an application being submitted and a probate grant being issued was five weeks. The median was one week.

That is a narrower measurement than most people assume. It does not include the time before the application: registering the death, locating the will, valuing the estate and, where tax is due, reporting and paying it. Those come first, and on most estates they take considerably longer than the registry does.

Which number should you actually plan around?

The median, in most cases. Half of probate grants issued in a week or less.

The gap between a one week median and a five week mean is the whole story: a minority of difficult applications pulls the average up well above the typical case. So five weeks is not a floor, which is how averages like this usually get read. It is comfortably above what most applications take.

Does it matter which grant you need?

More than anything else in the figures, and this is the part that rarely gets reported.

Those numbers are for probate grants, which is what you apply for when there is a will naming you as executor. Letters of administration are slower by a wide margin: around 11 weeks where there is no will, and around 20 weeks where there is a will but an administrator has to be appointed instead of an executor.

If the estate you are dealing with is intestate, the registry’s part of the process is realistically a couple of months rather than a couple of weeks. That single fact changes the plan for the property more than any other number here.

How long does probate take? carries the single sourced figure this site uses for the overall timeline, which is a different question from the registry’s turnaround.

Is the backlog getting better or worse?

Both, depending on which end you look at. Grants are being issued around two weeks faster than in the equivalent quarter of 2024. At the same time the open caseload has grown: 42,490 cases open at the end of March 2026 against 35,740 a year earlier, a rise of 19%. Of those open cases, 78% had been open for less than six months.

The registry is faster per application and holding more of them at once, which is consistent with volume rising rather than performance slipping.

What does it change about selling a property?

Nothing about the earliest possible completion date, which is the point. Ownership has no legal route to transfer until the grant is issued, and that applies to an estate agent sale, an auction and a cash buyer equally. Anyone promising completion before the grant is either mistaken or not being straight with you.

What it does change is where the time is worth spending. Clearing the property, insuring it properly, getting more than one valuation and agreeing terms with a buyer can all happen while the application sits with the registry. Selling before probate is granted sets out what can and cannot be done in that window.

When will these figures change?

At the next quarterly release. They are on this site’s quarterly review cycle for that reason, and the current figures and their source are listed in our sources and review log.