Contesting a Will: The Grounds, the Deadlines and the Realities

There are two entirely different ways to challenge an estate, and they have different deadlines; one as short as six months from the grant. Here are the grounds that actually succeed, and what it takes to try.

Key takeaways

• There are two separate routes: challenging the validity of the will, or accepting it is valid and claiming reasonable financial provision under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975.
• An Inheritance Act claim must generally be brought within six months of the grant of representation under section 4, and the court’s power to extend that is a discretion, not a right.
• Validity challenges have different and longer limitation positions depending on what is being claimed, so no single deadline covers them all, but delay and distribution of the estate can defeat you in practice.
• Testamentary capacity is judged by the test in Banks v Goodfellow (1870), at the time the will was made; a dementia diagnosis neither proves nor disproves it.
• A caveat stops a grant being issued, lasts six months and can be renewed, but it is the wrong tool for an Inheritance Act claim because that claim needs a grant first.
• Most inheritance disputes are resolved by negotiation or mediation rather than at trial, and unreasonably refusing to mediate can affect costs even for a party who wins.

The short answer: two different challenges

People say “contesting a will” as though it were one thing. In England and Wales it is two, and they have almost nothing in common. Working out which one you are in is the first and most important decision, because the grounds, the evidence, the people who can bring it and the deadlines are all different.

• Route one – the will is not valid. You say the document should not stand at all: the testator lacked the mental capacity to make it, was coerced, did not know and approve what they were signing, or it was not properly signed and witnessed. If you succeed, the will is set aside and the estate passes under an earlier valid will or under the intestacy rules.
• Route two – the will is valid but it does not provide for you. You accept the document is genuine, but say it fails to make reasonable financial provision for you under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. The will stands; the court can redistribute part of the estate.

The practical difference: route one attacks the document; route two asks for provision from an estate governed by a document you are not disputing. You can sometimes run both in the alternative, but they are separate claims with separate deadlines.

Route one: the will is not valid

A valid will must clear several hurdles; a challenge succeeds by showing it did not clear one.

Start with the formalities. Section 9 of the Wills Act 1837 requires the will to be in writing, signed by the testator (or at their direction) with the intention of giving effect to it, and signed or acknowledged before two witnesses present at the same time, each of whom then signs. Homemade and online wills fail these points far more often than professionally drafted ones, and it is the cheapest ground to check because it is visible on the face of the document.

The evidence you will need

Validity challenges are won and lost on contemporaneous records, not on family recollection. The core disclosure request is a Larke v Nugus request: a letter to the solicitor who prepared the will asking for their file and for an account of how the will came to be made — who gave the instructions, whether the testator was seen alone, what was said about capacity, what the testator was told about the effect of the will. The Law Society expects solicitors to respond to a properly made request. That file is usually the single most valuable document in the case.

You will also want the deceased’s GP, hospital and care home records, attendance notes for earlier wills, and evidence of who was involved when the will was made.

Lack of testamentary capacity, and the Banks v Goodfellow test

The test for testamentary capacity comes from Banks v Goodfellow (1870), and it is still the test today. The testator must have been able to:

1. understand the nature of making a will and its effects;
2. understand the extent of the property they were disposing of;
3. comprehend and appreciate the claims to which they ought to give effect – in plain terms, who might reasonably expect to be provided for; and
4. be free from any disorder of the mind that poisons their affections, perverts their sense of right, or prevents the exercise of their natural faculties in disposing of their property.

Two points carry a lot of weight in practice. Capacity is assessed at the time the will was made (or, where instructions were given earlier, potentially at the time of instructions). A diagnosis of dementia is not the end of the question: capacity fluctuates, and many people with a diagnosis retain the ability to make a valid will. Equally, the absence of a diagnosis does not prove capacity.

And a will that looks rational on its face is presumed valid. The burden shifts only if you can raise a real doubt – medical evidence, a marked and unexplained change from an earlier will, or a solicitor’s file that shows no proper assessment was made. A careful drafter will have followed the long-standing practice of obtaining a medical opinion where the testator is elderly or seriously ill. Where that was not done, and the will is unusual, the challenge is on much firmer ground.

Undue influence, want of knowledge and approval, and forgery

Undue influence

This is the ground people reach for most and prove least often. In the context of wills, undue influence means coercion; pressure that overpowers the testator’s own wishes so the will is not really theirs. Persuasion, pestering, being the favourite child, or simply being the person who did all the caring is not enough. There is no presumption of undue influence in will cases, as there can be with lifetime gifts: you must prove it, and the court will not infer it if the facts are equally consistent with the testator having made a free choice.

What supports it: dependence, isolation from other family, the beneficiary arranging the will and instructing the drafter, a sudden change close to death, and the testator never being seen alone.

Want of knowledge and approval

This is often the stronger alternative. The question is narrower: did the testator know and approve the contents of the will? It does not require you to prove wrongdoing by anyone. Where circumstances excite the court’s suspicion — a frail or blind testator, a will read over hurriedly, a substantial gift to the person who arranged it — the person putting the will forward has to satisfy the court that the testator understood and approved what they signed.

Forgery and fraud

Forgery means the will or the signature is not genuine. Fraud means the testator was deliberately misled — told lies about another family member, for example, to secure a different distribution. Both are serious allegations, both require clear evidence (typically a handwriting expert for forgery), and both carry real costs risk if pleaded without a proper basis. Do not allege either on suspicion alone.

Revocation

A will can also fail because it was revoked — by a later will, by destruction with the intention of revoking it, or, in most cases, by the testator marrying or forming a civil partnership after making it. That last one surprises people regularly.

Route two: the will is valid but unfair – Inheritance Act claims

An Inheritance Act claim does not suggest anyone did anything wrong. It accepts the will is valid and asks the court to decide that it fails to make reasonable financial provision for you, and to order provision out of the estate.

There are two standards. For a surviving spouse or civil partner, the standard is what it would be reasonable for them to receive in all the circumstances, whether or not required for their maintenance; a broad standard, often compared with what they might have received on divorce. For everyone else, it is the maintenance standard: what is reasonable for their maintenance, which is about meeting living needs rather than achieving a fair share.

That distinction decides a great many cases. An adult child in comfortable circumstances who is simply disappointed usually has a weak claim. An adult child with a disability, or one who was financially dependent on the deceased, is in a different position entirely.

The court weighs a statutory list of factors: your present and future financial resources and needs, those of any other applicant and of the beneficiaries, any obligations the deceased had towards you, the size and nature of the estate, any physical or mental disability, and anything else relevant; including the deceased’s own reasons for leaving you out, and how you behaved towards them. A well-drafted letter of wishes explaining an exclusion is often the executors’ best evidence.

Who can bring an Inheritance Act claim

The categories are closed. If you are not in one of them, you cannot bring the claim, however unfair the will feels:

• the spouse or civil partner of the deceased;
• a former spouse or civil partner who has not remarried or formed a new civil partnership, and where no order barring such a claim was made on the divorce;
• a person who lived with the deceased as if a spouse or civil partner for the whole of the two years immediately before the death;
• a child of the deceased, of any age, including an adult child and an adopted child;
• a person treated as a child of the family in relation to a marriage, civil partnership, or the deceased’s family, typically a stepchild;
• any other person who was being maintained by the deceased, wholly or partly, immediately before the death.

Note who is missing. Unmarried partners of under two years, siblings, carers who were not maintained and friends have no standing, whatever was said to them. Where a promise was made and you acted on it to your cost, the alternative is proprietary estoppel — a different claim requiring a promise, reliance and detriment, and common in farming families.

The rules also matter when there is no will at all. Intestacy can leave an unmarried partner with nothing, which is a frequent source of these claims, see what happens when there is no will at all.

The deadlines, including the six-month trap

This is where readers most often go wrong: the two routes are governed by completely different rules.

Inheritance Act claims

Six months from the grant of representation, under section 4 of the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. The court has a discretion to permit a claim after that, and in deciding whether to do so it will look at how promptly you acted, whether you were negotiating, whether you had legal advice, whether the estate has already been distributed, and whether you have any claim at all worth allowing through. An extension is a concession, not an entitlement, and no one can tell you in advance that you will get one.

Validity challenges

There is no equivalent single deadline, and anyone who tells you there is a flat “twelve years to contest a will” is oversimplifying. The position varies with what you are actually asking for. A claim to prove a will in solemn form or to revoke a grant is not subject to the same fixed period; a claim to recover your share of an estate from personal representatives has its own, longer, statutory period under the Limitation Act 1980; and where fraud or deliberate concealment is involved, time can be postponed until you discovered it or could reasonably have done.

What does not vary is the practical position. Once an estate has been distributed and the money spent, winning becomes a much poorer consolation. Delay can also defeat a claim in its own right where you have stood by knowing the facts. Treat a validity challenge as urgent even though no calendar date is staring at you.

Rectification

A claim that the will contains a drafting mistake rather than the testator’s real intention has its own six-month deadline from the grant, under section 20 of the Administration of Justice Act 1982.

Caveats: how to stop a grant while you decide

If you need time to investigate, a caveat prevents a grant of representation being issued. It is the emergency brake, and it is the one step in this article that is genuinely quick and cheap.

The key facts, from the GOV.UK guidance on stopping a probate application:

• A caveat lasts six months, and can be renewed for further six-month periods.
• It can be entered online or by post, and you do not need a solicitor to enter one.
• It stops a grant being issued, which in turn stops the estate being administered and distributed.

What happens next is where it gets technical. Someone who wants the grant can issue a warning to your caveat. You then have a short period to enter an appearance setting out your interest, which makes the caveat permanent until a court order or agreement resolves it, or to let it lapse. If you enter an appearance without a proper basis, you risk a costs order. Take advice before responding to a warning.

A caveat is also the wrong tool for an Inheritance Act claim. That claim needs a grant to have been issued before the six-month period can even start, so blocking the grant does not help you and may simply antagonise everyone. Use a caveat where you are investigating validity.

What it costs, and who pays

This is the part that deserves candour. Contentious probate is expensive, slow and personally corrosive, and the costs come out of the same pot everyone is arguing about.

The starting point in civil litigation is that the unsuccessful party pays the successful party’s costs. There are two narrow, long-recognised exceptions in probate claims: broadly, where the testator’s own conduct (or the way the will was prepared) caused the litigation, costs may come out of the estate; and where the circumstances gave reasonable grounds for investigating the will’s validity, the court may make no order for costs. They are exceptions, they are argued about, and you should not treat either as a safety net.

Funding varies: privately, sometimes with a conditional fee agreement, sometimes with after-the-event insurance. What is right depends on the size of the estate and the strength of the case. We set out our costs information at our published fees rather than quoting figures here, because this work cannot be priced from a web page.

Most of these disputes never reach a trial

They settle, by negotiation, by a round-table meeting, or at mediation. The courts expect parties to engage with alternative dispute resolution, and an unreasonable refusal can affect costs even for a party who wins.

A trial means public judgment on your family’s private life, years of your attention, and costs that can absorb much of a modest estate. Sometimes it is the right answer. It is rarely the first one.

What to do next

1. Work out which route you are in. Are you saying the document is wrong, or that it is right but leaves you without provision? The answer changes everything that follows.
2. Find out whether a grant has been issued, and note the date. If you might have an Inheritance Act claim, that date starts your six months.
3. Get a copy of the will, and of any earlier will if one exists. Comparing them is often the fastest way to see whether there is anything in the concern.
4. Consider a caveat, but only if you are investigating validity and only if you understand what happens when it is warned off.
5. Make a Larke v Nugus request to the solicitor who prepared the will, and start collecting medical and care records.
6. Write down the timeline while it is fresh: who was involved, who was present, what changed and when.
7. Take advice early. Our wills and probate solicitors can tell you which claim, if any, is open to you and what the realistic options are. If you are on the administration side of an estate facing a challenge, our probate solicitors deal with that too.

No one can tell you at the outset that a challenge will succeed, and you should be cautious of anyone who does. What we can do is tell you honestly whether there is something worth investigating, what it will take, and what it is likely to cost you – in money and otherwise.

As at October 2026, this reflects the law as it currently stands in England and Wales.