Almost every organisation that explains wills in Scotland declines to say what one costs. The Scottish Government, the Law Society of Scotland, Citizens Advice and the banks all publish careful guidance on why you should make a will and what happens if you do not, and none of them will tell you the number. So this page starts with the number.

The number is the easy part. What it does not tell you is whether the will you buy will do what you expect it to do, and that is where the real money is decided. Two features of Scots law defeat more wills than price ever does. The first is that a will cannot exclude legal rights: a surviving spouse or civil partner, and the children, keep an automatic claim over the deceased’s net moveable estate whatever the will says. The second is that a will subscribed by the granter is valid without a witness, but it loses the presumption under section 3(1) of the Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995, so the signature may have to be proved by other evidence, typically by affidavit in an application to the sheriff under section 4. Both are explained in full below, and both cost more to put right afterwards than the difference between the cheapest and the dearest price in the table.

So the question that follows the price is not who is cheapest, but what the price includes: a document, or advice about legal rights, liferents, trusts and second families. That is the difference the table cannot show you.

What Scottish firms actually charge

The following is drawn from the published price lists of eight Scottish firms, read on 14th August 2026. Firms are not named. The figures are as each firm states them, and the VAT treatment differs: six of the eight add VAT to the price shown and two include it, so comparing an inclusive price with an exclusive one will mislead you by a fifth. Adding twenty per cent where VAT is excluded gives an inclusive range of roughly £180 to £450 for a single will. Published prices change without notice, so treat these as an indication of the market rather than as a quotation.

Add twenty per cent where VAT is added, and the range for a simple single will runs from about £180 to about £450 all in. That is a spread of two and a half times for what is, in most cases, the same document.

Why the same document costs three times as much at one firm as another

Partly it is overheads and location. Mostly it is that the firms are not selling the same thing, and the tiered price lists make that visible.

Several firms publish a simple price and a complex price. One surveyed firm charges £300 plus VAT for a simple single will, £375 plus VAT where the will sets up a trust or appoints guardians for children, and £475 plus VAT where there is a liferent or a discretionary trust. Another runs three tiers at £375, £565 and £645 plus VAT. A third prices by counting the specific legacies: three gifts at the bottom tier, ten at the top.

So the honest answer to “why is that firm dearer” is usually that the dearer firm has assumed you need more than a simple will, and the cheaper firm has assumed you do not. The question worth asking on the telephone is not “what do you charge” but “what is included at that price, and what would take me into the next band”.

The things that genuinely move a will out of the simple band are consistent across every price list examined: a trust of any kind, a liferent, guardianship provisions for young children, business or agricultural assets, property outside Scotland, a second family, and anything requiring inheritance tax planning.

Do you actually need a solicitor?

Legally, no — and the Scottish position here is unusually clear, so it is worth stating precisely rather than vaguely.

Under section 2(1) of the Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995, a will is not valid as to the formalities of execution unless it is subscribed by the granter. Subscription by the person making the will is the whole of the requirement. Section 7(1) defines subscription as signing at the end of the last page. That is it. A will that you write yourself and sign at the foot of the last page is a formally valid Scottish will, with no witness and no solicitor involved.

The witness does something more subtle than most guidance suggests, and the distinction matters in practice. Under section 3(1) of the 1995 Act, where the will bears to be subscribed by the granter, bears to be signed by one person as witness, and states that witness’s name and address, the will is presumed to have been subscribed by the granter. The witness does not make the will valid. The will was already valid. What the witness does is remove the need to prove the signature later.

That presumption is what practitioners mean when they call a will self-proving, or probative. Neither word appears in the operative text of the 1995 Act, so treat both as useful shorthand rather than as statutory terms. The practical consequence is real enough: without the presumption, the signature may have to be proved by other evidence, typically by affidavit in an application to the sheriff under section 4 of the 1995 Act, at the worst possible moment. One witness, properly named and addressed, avoids all of it.

What a solicitor is actually being paid for

Not the typing. Three things, and they are worth naming because they are where home-made wills fail.

The first is that a will in Scotland cannot do what most people assume it can. Legal rights give a surviving spouse or civil partner, and children, a claim over the deceased’s net moveable estate — everything except land and buildings — which arises automatically and cannot be excluded by the will.

What that means in practice is routinely described wrongly, so it is worth being exact. A will leaving everything to one child does not disinherit the others. Their legal rights become a debt due by the estate, which the executor must satisfy out of the net moveable estate before paying any legacy. The effect is that the child named in the will receives less than the will appears to give, but the claim lies against the executor administering the estate rather than against that child. An executor who distributes without providing for it may be personally liable.

Legal rights are not, however, indestructible. They can be discharged, either in lifetime or after the death. Under section 13 of the Succession (Scotland) Act 1964 a claimant must elect between taking a legacy and claiming legal rights, and cannot have both unless the will says otherwise. They attach only to whatever moveable estate is actually left at death, so lifetime spending, gifts or conversion of moveables into land shrinks the fund they bite on. And they prescribe after twenty years. People discover all of this after the death, which is the one moment nothing can be done about it.

The second is the residue. A great many home-made wills give away specific things and never say who takes what is left, with the result that part of the estate falls into intestacy and is distributed by statute rather than by the will. This is the single most common defect in amateur wills and it is invisible until it matters.

The third is that the will has to work alongside everything else — a survivorship destination on the title to the house, a pension death benefit paid at the trustees’ discretion, a life policy written in trust. Those assets may pass outside the will entirely, which can leave a carefully drafted will governing a fraction of what the person thought they were dealing with.

None of that argues that everyone needs a solicitor. It argues that the saving on a home-made will is real only where the estate is genuinely simple and the residue clause is right.

The free and low-cost routes that genuinely operate in Scotland

Several exist, and they are underused. One widely advertised scheme is much less available here than the publicity implies, so take them in order of reliability.

Will Aid runs every November and is the most dependable of them. Participating solicitors waive their fee and you make a voluntary donation to the scheme’s charities instead, with suggested amounts of £120 for a single will and £200 for a pair of mirror wills. The donation goes to the charities rather than to the firm, and you are free to give a different amount. Bookings usually open in September and the good firms fill quickly. SCIAF is the Scottish charity partner.

Trade union schemes are the most overlooked. Unite provides a free solicitor-drafted simple will to members after thirteen weeks of membership. UnionLine, the union-owned firm serving GMB, CWU and others, provides a free simple will to members and their partners, and states expressly that members in Scotland are referred to a specialist firm in their own region rather than being given an English will. Several other unions run comparable schemes. If you are in a union, ask before you pay anybody.

Charity free will schemes run all year rather than in a single month. Shelter Scotland, Children’s Hospices Across Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust all offer one, generally through the National Free Wills Network, under which the charity pays a discounted rate to a local firm. Simple wills only, and there is no obligation to leave a gift to the charity — the schemes say so in terms. The Stroke Association runs a separate year-round scheme for people over sixty and for stroke survivors over eighteen.

Online will services, and what you give up

Wills are advertised online in Scotland for under £100. The lowest price found while researching this page was £99 for a single will and £149 for mirror wills, from a provider whose website is written for Scotland and whose documents may well be perfectly competent.

The point to understand is regulatory rather than technical. That provider is a limited company, not a firm of solicitors. Will writing is not a reserved activity in Scotland, so anybody may do it. A will-writing company is not regulated by the Law Society of Scotland; it does not carry the profession’s compulsory Master Policy indemnity insurance, which covers solicitors in private practice to £2,000,000 per claim; its clients are outside the Scottish Solicitors’ Guarantee Fund; and a complaint about it does not go to the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, because the list of practitioners in section 46 of the Legal Profession and Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 2007 is exhaustive and does not include will writers.

One qualification on the Guarantee Fund, because it is widely misunderstood in the other direction: it covers pecuniary loss caused by a solicitor’s dishonesty. It is not a compensation scheme for negligence. Negligence is what the Master Policy is for.

Whether any of it matters depends on what goes wrong and when. A defect in a will is characteristically discovered after the granter has died, which is both the point at which it cannot be fixed and the point at which the question of who is answerable for it becomes acute. That is what the extra hundred pounds buys, and it is a reasonable thing to decide you do not need.

The costs that come afterwards

The fee for writing the will is not the whole cost of the arrangement, and firms differ in what they fold in.

Storage. Most firms store the principal will free. Some charge — one surveyed firm publishes £35 plus VAT a year, which includes an annual review. Ask, because an annual storage charge compounds quietly.

Registration. Registering a will for preservation in the Books of Council and Session costs £20, charged by Registers of Scotland rather than by the court, and that fee includes an extract. It is optional, and it is not the same thing as the will being valid.

Updating it. A will should be looked at again after a marriage, a divorce, a death, a birth, a house purchase or a business change. Some firms include one update; most charge for a codicil or a fresh will. A fresh will is often cheaper and always cleaner than a codicil.

What happens at the end. The cost of writing a will is trivial beside the cost of winding up the estate afterwards, which is charged quite separately and usually as a percentage. Published executry scales run from three to six per cent of an estate between £200,001 and £500,000, and from five to ten per cent on an estate between £50,001 and £100,000, plus VAT. There is more on that at what confirmation is and what it costs.

What to ask before you instruct anybody

Four questions settle almost every misunderstanding about price. Is that figure inclusive of VAT or exclusive? What takes this out of the simple band and into the next one? Is storage included, and for how long? And what would you charge to wind up the estate afterwards, as a percentage?

A firm that answers all four without hesitation is telling you something useful about how it works.

Tell us what you need and we will pass your details to one of our member firms, who will be in touch. You can check any Scottish solicitor on the Law Society of Scotland’s public roll yourself.

Sources

• Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995, section 2, legislation.gov.uk
• Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995, section 3, legislation.gov.uk
• Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995, section 7, legislation.gov.uk
• Succession (Scotland) Act 1964, section 13, legislation.gov.uk
• Legal Profession and Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 2007, section 46, legislation.gov.uk
• How solicitors are insured, Law Society of Scotland
• Making a will, Law Society of Scotland
• Sheriff court fees, Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service
• Will Aid
• Wills, Unite Legal Services
• Wills, UnionLine
• Write your will for free, Shelter Scotland
• Wills, Citizens Advice Scotland

This page is general information about the law of Scotland and is not advice on your circumstances. Prices are those published by the named firms and read on 14th August 2026; they change without notice and are not quotations. Court fees change annually.