Section 27 Notices: Advertising for Hidden Debts

No. Advertising for creditors is not compulsory. Nothing stops you paying out a deceased estate to the beneficiaries the day the grant arrives. But if you do that and a debt you had never heard of turns up afterwards, the creditor's first call is on you, personally, as the executor — not on the people who spent the money. That is why a section 27 notice exists, and why most executors dealing with a deceased estate decide they need one.

A section 27 notice is an advertisement placed under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925. It says, in formal language, that you intend to distribute the estate and that anyone with a claim against it should come forward by a stated date, which must be at least two months away. Wait out that period, make the searches the section expects of you, and you can then distribute having regard only to the claims you actually knew about. A creditor who stayed silent cannot afterwards come for your own money.

It is a narrow protection, and it is worth understanding exactly how narrow before you rely on it. It protects the executor. It does not protect the beneficiaries, and it does not make the debt go away.

What a section 27 notice actually is

Section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925 lets personal representatives — executors named in a will, or administrators appointed where there is none — give notice of their intention to distribute. The notice asks any person interested to send in particulars of their claim within a period fixed in the notice, and that period cannot be shorter than two months.

In practice the notice goes in two places. The first is The Gazette, the official public record, which is where the statutory notices for deceased estates are published and where credit reference agencies, tracing firms and institutional creditors look. The second, where the deceased owned land, is a newspaper circulating in the district where that land is. The wording is short and formulaic: the name and last address of the deceased, the date of death, the executor's details or their solicitor's, and the date by which claims must be sent in.

An executor's authority comes from the will and takes effect from the date of death, so an executor can place the notice without waiting for the grant of probate. An administrator's authority comes from the grant itself, so in an intestacy it is usual to wait until letters of administration have been issued. Where the notice can be placed early, it is worth doing, because the two months then runs alongside the slow work of collecting in assets rather than after it.

You can read the section itself on legislation.gov.uk. It is one of the shorter pieces of law you will meet as an executor, and it repays five minutes.

The two-month wait, and what it buys you

Once the period stated in the notice has expired, section 27 says you may distribute the estate having regard only to the claims of which you then had notice, and that you are not liable to anyone whose claim you had not been told about.

Strip out the statutory language and it means this. An executor is normally personally liable if they pay away money that should have gone to a creditor. That liability is real, it does not depend on bad faith, and it is not capped at what you inherited yourself. The notice converts that open-ended exposure into a bounded one: after the two months, you answer for what you knew, and not for what nobody told you.

That protection is why solicitors treat the notice as routine and why the two-month period is usually treated as a floor rather than a target. Many executors place the notice as early as they can and then use the wait productively — closing accounts, valuing the property, getting the tax position straight — so the deadline passes without adding weeks to anything.

What the notice does not do

Four things, and each one has caught executors out.

It does not stop the creditor. Section 27 expressly preserves the right of a person to follow the property into the hands of whoever received it. The debt does not die with the deadline; it simply stops being your problem and becomes the beneficiaries' problem. If your sister has been given a share of the estate and a lender surfaces afterwards, the lender can pursue her for what she received. Telling beneficiaries this at the time of payment is kinder than letting them find out later.

It does not cover what you knew, or ought to have known. The protection is limited to claims you had no notice of. Notice is not confined to a letter addressed to you. A direct debit on a bank statement, a card in a wallet, a lender's name in the post, a mention in the deceased's papers — all of that is information you had, and an executor who ignores it is not shielded by an advertisement. The notice covers the genuinely unknown, not the wilfully unexamined.

It does not touch a secured debt. A mortgage or a secured loan attaches to the property, not to the executor's judgement about who to pay. The lender's security survives regardless of any advertisement.

It does nothing about family provision claims. A claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 is not a creditor's claim, and section 27 does not address it. Those claims must ordinarily be brought within six months of the grant, and a court can extend that period. The conventional caution is to wait six months from the grant, and often a further four to allow for a claim issued late in the day to be served, before distributing an estate where such a claim looks possible.

The searches you still have to make

Section 27 is explicit that the notice does not free personal representatives from making the searches an intending purchaser of the property would be advised to make. In other words, the advertisement is one half of a two-part exercise, and an executor who advertises but does not look is only partly protected.

In practice that means the ordinary conveyancing searches against any land in the estate, and a bankruptcy search against the deceased. It also means, in the modern world, a few things that no statute mentions:

• The credit file. The credit reference agencies hold a record of the deceased's open accounts, and the banking industry runs a free notification service that flags a death to multiple institutions at once. This is the fastest way to find borrowing you did not know about.
• Twelve months of bank statements. Read them line by line. Recurring payments reveal subscriptions, insurance, storage units, finance agreements and small monthly repayments to lenders you have never heard of.
• The email inbox. Digital-only lenders and buy now, pay later accounts send nothing on paper. If nobody looks at the email, those accounts are invisible until a debt collector writes.
• Anything signed for a business. Personal guarantees, trade accounts and leases are the debts most likely to be large and least likely to appear on a bank statement.

That last one deserves particular care. A guarantee is a promise that binds the estate even though no money ever passed through the deceased's account, which is why the position of a guarantor on a tenancy who dies first catches families out so regularly. The same is true of business borrowing, whether the deceased traded through a company — set out in what happens to a one-person limited company with debts — or in their own name, covered in who pays a sole trader's business debts.

When it is clearly worth placing, and when executors reasonably skip it

The honest position is that plenty of small, simple estates are distributed without a notice and nothing goes wrong. An executor who was the deceased's spouse, who handled the household finances for decades, who knows there was no borrowing and no business, is making a defensible judgement if they decide the risk is negligible.

The judgement stops being defensible fairly quickly. Place a notice if any of these are true:

• The deceased ran a business, at any scale, in any form.
• They were self-employed. HMRC will want a final return, and the position is set out in the last tax bill of a self-employed person who died.
• You were not close to them, or had been estranged, or live in a different part of the country.
• There were credit cards, an overdraft, or any sign of revolving borrowing. Even a modest one — a sole account left overdrawn is a debt of the estate like any other.
• The estate is large enough that the beneficiaries would notice a clawback, or small enough that a single unexpected debt would swallow it.

The cost of a notice is small set against the exposure it removes, and it is an expense of the estate rather than something the executor funds personally. If you are already instructing a solicitor for the probate application, placing the notice is usually a line on their bill rather than a separate project.

What the ritual tells you about hidden debt

It is worth stepping back and asking why a provision from 1925 is still used daily. The answer is that borrowing has always been easier to hide than to find, and it has become far easier since the law was written.

A person's debts used to leave a paper trail through the letterbox. Now they arrive as app notifications on a locked phone. Buy now, pay later arrangements often sit outside the traditional credit file. A guarantee signed years ago for an adult child's tenancy or a business lease leaves no trace in a current account. A loan from a family member is real, enforceable, and completely undocumented.

Executors are not detectives, and the law does not ask them to be. What it asks is that they advertise, look properly, and wait. The two months is the point in the process where the estate stops being a private matter inside one family and briefly becomes a public one — and where the things nobody mentioned get their chance to surface.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Section 27 is a provision of the Trustee Act 1925, and it applies in England and Wales only. The practice varies elsewhere.

In Scotland, the executor gathers in the estate under confirmation rather than a grant of probate, and there is no direct statutory equivalent handing the executor this protection. Scottish executors commonly advertise in the Edinburgh Gazette anyway, as prudence rather than as a shield, and the caution about distributing early applies at least as strongly. Small estates in Scotland can be dealt with through the sheriff clerk, as explained in small estate confirmation in Scotland.

Northern Ireland has its own trustee legislation and its own probate system, run separately from the one in England and Wales, and statutory notices there appear in the Belfast Gazette. The process differences are set out in how probate in Northern Ireland runs on its own rules.

Wherever you are, the notice sits alongside the tax work rather than replacing it. Whether the estate is an excepted one or needs a full account changes the timetable considerably, which we cover in excepted estate or IHT400. The rest of this subject sits in the guide to debt, credit and finance after a death.

The other side of the notice

Everything above is written for the person clearing up. It is worth reading once from the other direction, because the executor's problem is created entirely by the deceased's paperwork.

Two things make an estate straightforward to administer. The first is a list — of accounts, lenders, guarantees, subscriptions and policies — kept somewhere the family can find it. Not a filing cabinet of statements. A single page, updated occasionally, naming the institutions. It removes most of the uncertainty that a section 27 notice exists to manage.

The second is liquidity. Most of the difficulty in a bereaved family's first year is not that the estate is insolvent but that the money is locked up while the bills are not. Life insurance held in trust generally pays to the named beneficiaries without waiting for the grant, and generally outside the estate, which means it does not sit in the queue behind the creditors. If you want to see what that would involve, an FCA-authorised broker can quote for life cover. What can be offered, and on what terms, always depends on underwriting and on what is disclosed about health.

If you are the executor and you are unsure, free help exists before you commit to anything. GOV.UK sets out the probate process, Citizens Advice covers dealing with debts after a death, and MoneyHelper is government-backed and free.

Frequently asked questions

What is a section 27 notice?

It is an advertisement placed by personal representatives under section 27 of the Trustee Act 1925, asking anyone owed money by the deceased, or with a claim on the estate, to come forward. It is published in The Gazette, and normally also in a newspaper circulating in the district of any land the deceased owned. Its purpose is to protect the executor rather than to cancel anybody's debt.

How long do I have to wait after placing the notice?

The notice must allow at least two months for claims to be sent in. Once that period has passed, an executor who has also made the proper searches can distribute the estate without being personally liable to a creditor who never responded. That creditor may still pursue the beneficiaries for what they received, because section 27 protects the executor rather than the money.

Do I have to place a notice at all?

It is not compulsory, but going without one leaves you personally exposed to debts you did not know about. For a small estate where you knew the person's affairs intimately, some executors accept that risk with their eyes open. Where there was borrowing, business activity, self-employment or estrangement, it is cheap protection and the sensible default.