How to Find Every Debt Someone Left Behind

Before you pay anyone, find everyone. That is the whole discipline of this stage, and it is the difference between an administration that closes cleanly and one that comes back at you personally in eighteen months' time.

The practical answer to how you find out what debts someone had when they died is that there are four sources and you use all of them. Credit reports for the deceased from the three UK credit reference agencies. A single notification to the banks through the Death Notification Service. Twelve months of bank and card statements, read line by line. And a formal advertisement for creditors nobody could reasonably have known about. Used together they catch almost everything. Used one at a time they catch a fraction.

You will be under pressure to pay things before the search is finished, because letters arrive from week two and some of them are stern. Resist it, with the single exception of the funeral. Money paid out of an estate cannot be recalled, and until you know the total you do not know whether there is enough to go round.

The short answer: build one list, then stop paying anything

Open a single document and give it two columns: what is owed, and what is owned. Everything you find goes on it, dated, with a note of where it came from. That list is the thing you are actually building over the next few weeks, and it decides everything that follows — whether the estate is solvent, what order things get paid in, and whether you can safely give anyone their inheritance.

Until it is reasonably complete, the only payments that should leave the estate are the funeral and anything that protects an asset: the mortgage on the house, the finance on a car you intend to keep, the buildings insurance. Ordinary unsecured creditors — cards, loans, catalogue accounts, overdrafts — wait. They are used to waiting, whatever the tone of the letters suggests.

Remember that the search runs in both directions. An estate that looks insolvent in week two often turns out to be solvent once a forgotten pension or an old policy comes to light, so run the asset hunt in parallel: how to find bank accounts nobody knew about, how to trace every pension he had, and how to find out whether someone had life insurance each cover a different part of it. Do not conclude anything about the state of the estate until both columns are filled in.

Start with the three credit reference agencies

Experian, Equifax and TransUnion between them hold the record of most regulated borrowing in the UK. Ask all three. Lenders choose which agencies they report to, and it is entirely normal for an account to appear on one file and not the others.

There is a wrinkle worth understanding, because it explains why the ordinary process does not apply. Data protection rights in the UK belong to living individuals, so the statutory right you would use to obtain your own credit report does not survive a person's death.

Source: Information Commissioner's Office guidance on personal data relating to deceased individuals, ico.org.uk.

What the agencies operate instead is a bereavement or deceased-search process for personal representatives. You register the death, supply the death certificate and evidence of your authority to act, and they return what they hold. Doing this has a second benefit that matters more than people expect: it flags the record so that credit cannot easily be taken out in the deceased's name afterwards, which is a genuine and unpleasant problem in the months after a death is publicly known.

Read the reports for accounts rather than for scores. You are looking for lender names, account types, opening dates and balances — and particularly for anything you have never heard of. Note the closed accounts too. A card closed last year may point to a balance transferred somewhere else.

The Death Notification Service, and what it will not reach

The Death Notification Service is a free online service that lets you tell a number of UK banks and building societies about a death in one submission, rather than writing to each in turn. It saves a great deal of time, and there is no reason not to use it early.

Two limits are important. It only reaches firms that participate, and the list does not include everybody — smaller lenders, credit unions, motor finance houses and specialist providers are frequently outside it. And it notifies; it does not investigate. It will not tell you about an account at a bank that is not on the list, and it will not surface borrowing that was never with a bank at all.

So treat it as a way of clearing the easy ground quickly, then write separately to any institution the statements or the credit reports point to. Keep a copy of every letter and note the date. If you later have to show that you searched properly, that file is the evidence.

Twelve months of statements, read line by line

This is the least glamorous part of the job and the most productive. Get at least twelve months of statements for every current account, savings account and credit card, and read every line. Twenty-four months is better if the paperwork exists, because it catches anything annual.

What you are looking for:

• Direct debits and standing orders. Every regular payment has a payee, and every payee is either a bill, a subscription, an insurer or a lender. Chase down anything you cannot immediately explain.
• Small, repeating amounts. Instalment plans, doorstep collections and subscriptions look trivial line by line and add up to real money across a year.
• Annual payments. Ground rent, service charge, professional subscriptions, insurance premiums. These vanish if you only look at a quarter.
• Interest and charges. An interest line on an account you thought was in credit tells you there is a facility you have not found.
• Money coming in. Pensions, rental income and benefit payments all point to things that must now be stopped, corrected or claimed.

Then do the same with the post and the inbox. Keep every envelope that arrives for a year, however routine it looks. Search the email account for terms like "your statement", "payment due", "agreement number" and the names of the lenders you have already found. Look at the phone: banking and lender apps installed on it are a list of relationships in themselves, and text alerts often name a creditor that no paper ever mentioned.

The borrowing that never appears on a credit file

Credit files are good at regulated consumer lending and blind to a surprising amount of everything else. These are the categories that catch families out, and every one of them can produce a claim against the estate.

• Buy now pay later. Short instalment plans have historically not been reported to the credit reference agencies in the way ordinary credit is, and the position has been changing. Card statements and the email inbox are far better sources than a credit report here.
• Catalogue, mail order and doorstep credit. Some of it reports, much of it does not, and the letters can take months to arrive.
• Money owed to family and friends. Nothing records this anywhere. Ask, gently and openly, and ask early — a relative who mentions a loan after the estate has been distributed is a genuine problem.
• Business and trade accounts. A sole trader's business debts are personal debts. Supplier accounts, trade credit and equipment finance may exist with no consumer footprint at all.
• Personal guarantees. The quietest liability of the lot. A guarantee given for a company, a commercial lease or a child's tenancy can survive the guarantor and bind the estate, as our piece on what happens when a guarantor dies and the lender wants the loan repaid explains. The reverse situation, where the borrower dies and the guarantor is left paying, is worth reading if he had guaranteed someone else's borrowing.
• Vehicle finance. Hire purchase, conditional sale and personal contract purchase agreements mean the car may never have been his to leave. What the family can and cannot do with it is set out in whether you can keep the car if it is still on hire purchase, and if the vehicle has been written off there is a separate question about whether GAP insurance pays anything when the driver dies. A finance check against the registration number will reveal an outstanding agreement quickly.
• Secured loans you did not know about. The charges register of the property title lists every lender with security over the house, including second charges and equity release. A copy of the register can be obtained from HM Land Registry's property search service, and it is worth doing even where you are certain there is only one mortgage.
• Gifts made shortly before death. Not a debt, but you need the list. Gifts matter for inheritance tax, and where an estate turns out to be insolvent they are not automatically beyond reach — see whether a gifted deposit can be clawed back from an insolvent estate.

Tell Us Once, HMRC and money owed to the state

When you register the death you will usually be offered the Tell Us Once service, which reports the death to a range of government departments and to the local council in one go. Use it. It stops payments that would otherwise have to be repaid, and it starts several processes that take time.

It does not, however, settle what is owed. Three areas need chasing directly.

Tax. There is usually a final tax position to the date of death. Where the deceased completed self assessment returns there may be a return outstanding and a balance due; where they were taxed through PAYE there can be an under or overpayment. HMRC is a creditor of the estate like any other and should be on your list from the start rather than added at the end.

Benefits and pensions. Payments made after the date of death are generally recoverable, and an overpayment that arose earlier can be pursued against the estate. Departments will write, but they can take months, so ask rather than wait.

Council tax. An unoccupied property that was the deceased's home is normally exempt while it awaits a grant, and for a period afterwards, but the rules differ across the UK and the exemption has to be claimed. Ring the council, tell them the date of death, and get the position in writing.

Advertise for creditors, then decide what to pay

Searching well protects the estate. Advertising protects you.

In England and Wales, a personal representative can place a statutory notice for creditors under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925 — in the London Gazette and, where the estate includes land, in a newspaper circulating in the area — and then wait at least two months from the last notice before distributing. Do that, and a creditor who appears afterwards cannot hold you personally responsible for having paid out without knowing about them. Start it early, because the two months runs perfectly well alongside everything else on this page.

Understand what it does not do. It protects you against claims you had no notice of, not against ones you did. An unopened letter in a drawer is notice. And it does not protect the beneficiaries: an unpaid creditor can still pursue money into the hands of the people who received it, which is a conversation to have with the family before the money moves, not after.

Once the list is as complete as you can make it, the picture usually falls into one of two shapes. If the estate is comfortably solvent, pay the debts properly and in full, keep the receipts, and distribute afterwards. If it is not, stop. An insolvent estate is paid in a strict statutory order and the executor who guesses at that order can end up making good the difference personally. Take advice at that point. MoneyHelper is government-backed and free, and Citizens Advice and StepChange both handle debt after a bereavement without selling anything.

There is one more thing worth saying, because it is the reason this search is frightening rather than merely tedious. What makes the difference between the two shapes above is almost always whether money arrives quickly from outside the estate. A life policy written in trust pays to the family directly and usually within weeks, which is what allows a household to keep meeting a mortgage while the administration grinds on. If you are doing this search and discovering that no such cover existed, the question for your own household is a live one — you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker look at what would be needed and how it should be written. What any insurer will offer depends on underwriting.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The search itself is the same wherever you are. Credit reference agencies, banks, statements and email do not respect borders. What differs is the protective procedure and the timetable.

In Scotland the executor obtains confirmation rather than probate, and section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925 does not apply. The working rule instead is the six-month period from the date of death: an executor who distributes within it can be personally liable to a creditor who emerges afterwards, so the search and that period run together. Notices are advertised in the Edinburgh Gazette, and the time limit for enforcing an ordinary contract debt is five years rather than six.

Northern Ireland has its own succession and trustee legislation and its own probate office, with an equivalent advertising route and notices published in the Belfast Gazette. The Tell Us Once arrangements also work differently there, so ask the registrar what is available when you register the death rather than assuming the service you have read about applies.

The rest of this subject — which debts survive, which quietly do not, and who is genuinely liable for what — is collected in our guide to debt, credit and finance after a death.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out what debts someone had when they died?

Request the deceased's credit report from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion through their bereavement processes, use the Death Notification Service to tell participating banks and building societies at once, and read twelve months of bank statements looking for regular payments that identify a lender. Then advertise for creditors you could not have found.

What kinds of borrowing do credit reports miss?

Short buy-now-pay-later plans, some catalogue and doorstep credit, money owed to family or friends, business supplier accounts, personal guarantees, tax owed to HMRC, and anything taken out very recently that has not yet been reported. Bank statements and the email inbox are far better sources for all of these.

How long should I spend looking before paying anyone?

Finish the search before you distribute anything to beneficiaries, rather than before you settle obvious priority costs such as the funeral. Executors who advertise for creditors and wait the statutory two months are protected against unknown claims, which is why the search and the notice normally run alongside each other.