The three things you are paying for

A power of attorney in Scotland has a cost made up of separate parts, and conflating them is why the figures people quote each other vary so wildly.

There is the registration fee paid to the Office of the Public Guardian, which is fixed by law and is the same wherever you go. There is the solicitor’s fee for drafting the document and granting the certificate, which is not regulated and varies considerably. And there may be a medical fee, if a doctor rather than a solicitor grants the certificate of capacity, which is a private charge set by the practice.

The registration fee: £99

Submitting a continuing, welfare or combined power of attorney to the Public Guardian for registration costs £99. That figure was set by the Adults with Incapacity (Public Guardian’s Fees) (Scotland) Regulations 2026 and took effect on 1st April 2026.

Registering a deed of amendment to an existing power of attorney also costs £99. A duplicate or replacement certificate of registration costs £23 under the Regulations.

Note that the fee attaches to the document, not to the person. A couple granting mirror powers of attorney are submitting two documents and will pay £99 twice.

The registration fee rises to £102 on 1st April 2027 under schedule 2 of the same Regulations. The duplicate certificate fee stays at £23.

When you do not pay the fee at all

This is the part that is least well known and worth the most. The registration fee is not payable at all in a range of circumstances, and there is no discretion about it — if you qualify, it is waived.

You are exempt if you, or your partner, receive any of the following: income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, guarantee credit under the State Pension Credit Act 2002, income-related employment and support allowance, or universal credit. You are also exempt if you or your partner receive personal independence payment or adult disability payment and gross annual income is £26,437 or less, or if you or your partner received assistance under the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Act 2015 in the three months before the fee fell due. “Partner” here means a spouse or civil partner.

There is a separate exemption where you are receiving civil legal aid for the matter, or where your solicitor is acting under the special urgency provisions.

The cost nobody quotes you: the waiting time

This is the single most important thing on this page, and it is not a fee.

The Office of the Public Guardian publishes a notice each week stating which date of receipt it has reached. The notice dated 10th August 2026 stated that it was processing electronic submissions received around 25th June 2025 and postal submissions received around 18th September 2025.

Read those dates carefully. A document submitted electronically in June 2025 was being processed in August 2026 — a wait of roughly thirteen and a half months. A postal submission from September 2025 was reached in the same week, a wait of a little under eleven months.

Postal submission is currently the faster route. That is the reverse of what almost everyone assumes, and it is the reverse of what was true a couple of years ago. It is also the reverse of the advice given by a good deal of published guidance.

Section 19(1) of the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 is unambiguous about why this matters: a continuing or welfare attorney has no authority to act until the document has been registered. Not limited authority. None. A power of attorney sitting in the queue is a piece of paper.

There is an expedited service for genuinely urgent cases, which the Public Guardian operates at no additional fee. Its published aim is around five working days, though it has recently indicated that demand has pushed the actual wait to about ten. Either figure is a different order of magnitude from the ordinary queue. It is not available on request as a matter of preference — there has to be a real urgency — but where circumstances have changed suddenly, it exists, it is free, and a great many people do not know to ask.

What Scottish solicitors actually charge

Solicitors’ fees for powers of attorney are not fixed by anybody. The Law Society of Scotland does not set them, there is no scale, and nothing obliges a firm to publish a price. A good many do publish, though, and in August 2026 we went through the published price pages of Scottish firms and recorded what we found.

Across twenty-four firms publishing a price for a single continuing and welfare power of attorney, the fee ranged from £200 to £530 plus value added tax. The median was £350 plus value added tax, which is roughly £420 including it, and £350 was also the most common single figure — five firms sat exactly on it. Adding the Public Guardian’s £99 puts a typical all-in cost for one person somewhere around £520.

Eleven of those firms also published a price for a couple granting mirror powers, ranging from £400 to £775 plus value added tax. Those figures were checked on 14th August 2026 and firms change them, so treat them as the shape of the market rather than as a quotation.

Four patterns came out of it that are more useful than the numbers.

Everything is fixed-fee. Not one firm published an hourly rate for drafting a power of attorney. Even firms that charge by the hour for most private client work fix the price for this. So it is entirely reasonable to ask for a fixed figure, and a refusal to give one is unusual.

Couples pay less than two singles, but not by as much as you might expect. The typical couple’s price is around two-thirds to three-quarters of two individual fees. A few firms discount much more heavily, and a few barely discount at all, so it is worth asking specifically rather than assuming.

Almost every firm quotes excluding value added tax and excluding the registration fee. Only a small minority quote a figure that includes both. This is the single most common reason that two quotations which look very different turn out to be the same, and it is why the only question worth asking is what the total payable will be.

A great many published price pages are out of date on the registration fee. Across the firms surveyed, the Public Guardian’s fee was variously quoted as £81, £83, £85, £87, £96 and £99 — a series of historic rates. Roughly two-thirds of the pages understated the true total. That is not dishonesty, it is simply that a price page is written once and rarely revisited, but it does mean that the outlay figure on a firm’s website is the least reliable number on it.

What moves the price

Whether the document is standard or bespoke. A straightforward combined power appointing two children jointly is a different job from one involving a business, a trust, property abroad, a beneficiary with a disability, or attorneys who must act by majority in some matters and individually in others.

Whether the certificate is straightforward. Where capacity is obvious the certificate is a short interview. Where it is borderline, the solicitor may reasonably decline to certify without a medical opinion, and that opinion is charged for separately by the practice.

Whether you need somebody to come to you. Home and hospital visits attract a surcharge at most firms that mention them at all, commonly around one hundred pounds plus value added tax.

Can you do it yourself and avoid the solicitor’s fee?

Partly, and it is worth understanding exactly where the limit falls.

You can draft the document yourself. The Public Guardian is explicit that drafting is not something it can help with, because its role is registration rather than advice, and mygov.scot confirms that you may draw the document up yourself, while noting that most people use a solicitor so that nothing is missed.

What you cannot do yourself is the certificate. Sections 15(3)(c) and 16(3)(c) of the 2000 Act require the document to incorporate a certificate from a practising solicitor, or from a member of such other class of persons as may be prescribed. The prescribed classes are set by regulation 4 of the Adults with Incapacity (Certificates in Relation to Powers of Attorney) (Scotland) Regulations 2001, and they are practising members of the Faculty of Advocates and registered medical practitioners.

Whoever grants it must confirm that they interviewed you immediately before you signed, that they are satisfied you understand the nature and extent of the power, and that they have no reason to believe you are acting under undue influence or that anything else vitiates the granting. Section 15(4) is explicit that the person granting the certificate cannot be one of the attorneys.

So there is no wholly do-it-yourself power of attorney in Scotland. There is a self-drafted document with a professionally granted certificate, and the saving is smaller than it first appears — while the risk of a defective document being rejected after a ten-month wait is considerable.

The cost of not having one

If capacity is lost and no power of attorney is in place, the alternative is a guardianship order under Part 6 of the 2000 Act, applied for by summary application to the local sheriff court. A one-off transaction may instead be dealt with by an intervention order.

Registering a guardianship order with the Public Guardian costs £110, rising to £114 on 1st April 2027. But that is the smallest part of it, and the recurring supervision fees are where the real difference lies. A financial guardian pays a banded fee on the inventory and management plan, from £68 where the estate is up to £30,000, to £309 up to £50,000, £616 up to £250,000, £1,026 up to £500,000 and £1,544 above that. Account reviews are then charged periodically on similar bands, and there are further fees for selling or buying heritable property and for recalling a guardian.

In other words, a power of attorney is a one-off £99 plus a fixed fee of a few hundred pounds. A financial guardianship is a court application followed by a supervised relationship with the Public Guardian that carries a fee every time it is reviewed, potentially for the rest of the adult’s life.

What is not published anywhere official is the legal cost of a guardianship application or the overall timescale, and we are not going to invent either. What can be said is that guardianship involves a court application rather than a form, requires medical reports which must be no more than thirty days old when lodged, gives the local authority twenty-one days to prepare a report where welfare powers are sought, and can be opposed.

Civil legal aid may be available, and there is an important detail in how it is assessed: eligibility is based on the income and assets of the adult who has lost capacity, not those of the person applying to be guardian.

The comparison that matters is not between a few hundred pounds and nothing. It is between a few hundred pounds and a contested court process undertaken at the worst possible moment by a family who are already dealing with something difficult.

A note on terminology

If you have been reading about a “lasting power of attorney”, you have been reading about England and Wales. Lasting powers of attorney are created by the Mental Capacity Act 2005, which extends to England and Wales only. Scotland has continuing powers, covering property and financial affairs, and welfare powers, covering personal welfare, under the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000. Most people grant both in a single combined document.

There is also a difference in when they operate. A welfare power of attorney can only be used once you are incapable of making the decision yourself. A continuing power of attorney can be drafted to be usable immediately, which is often useful and occasionally unwise, and is a point to think about rather than accept as a default.

Sources

• Adults with Incapacity (Public Guardian’s Fees) (Scotland) Regulations 2026, schedule 1, legislation.gov.uk
• The same Regulations, regulation 4 — social security exemptions, legislation.gov.uk
• Weekly processing notices, Office of the Public Guardian (Scotland)
• Power of attorney fees, Office of the Public Guardian (Scotland)
• Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000, Part 2, legislation.gov.uk
• Adults with Incapacity (Certificates in Relation to Powers of Attorney) (Scotland) Regulations 2001, legislation.gov.uk
• Setting up a power of attorney, mygov.scot
• How guardianship is set up, mygov.scot
• Guardianship order fees, Office of the Public Guardian (Scotland)
• Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000, section 15, legislation.gov.uk

This page is general information about the law of Scotland and is not advice on your circumstances. The solicitors’ fees given here are a survey of prices published by twenty-four Scottish firms on their own websites, checked on 14th August 2026. They are not a quotation and they are not an endorsement of any firm. Fees and waiting times change, and the waiting times quoted here change weekly. Check the Office of the Public Guardian’s current notice before making plans that depend on a registration date.