What should it cost to store a will or important documents?

It is usually the first thing people want to know, and it is surprisingly hard to get a straight answer. Providers bury the price behind a contact form, or quote a headline figure and leave the fees that actually matter until later. So here is the honest version: what document storage costs in the UK, why the range is so wide, and what a fair price looks like.

What document storage actually costs in the UK

Broadly, there are four price points.

Free. Many solicitors and will writers store wills they drafted at no charge. It is a genuine service and for a lot of people it is perfectly adequate.

£20 to £40 a year. This is the typical range for paid storage with a will writer, a solicitor or a dedicated storage service. Some charge monthly instead, usually a couple of pounds.

£150 to £300 as a one-off. Lifetime storage, paid once. Priced roughly at seven to ten years of annual storage, on the assumption that most people keep a will for longer than that.

£200 a year and upwards. Private vaults and safe deposit facilities. You are paying for a secure room you could in principle visit, which is a different product from document custody.

There is also the probate service, which will hold your will for a one-off fee of £24. That is a genuinely cheap option and we cover it properly in our guide on where to store your will.

Why the same service costs £20 in one place and £240 in another

Storing paper securely is not expensive once the facility exists. The hard part is building and insuring a proper storage environment in the first place. After that, keeping one more document safe costs very little, and the marginal cost of the ten thousandth document is close to the marginal cost of the tenth.

So when prices vary by a factor of ten, the difference is rarely the storage. It is usually one of three things.

The first is a captive market. If your will is already with a firm, moving it is a small hassle, and firms know that. Prices tend to drift upward for people who are unlikely to shop around.

The second is bundling. Storage is sometimes priced as part of a larger package, where nobody ever sees the line item, so it never has to justify itself.

The third is a genuinely different product. A private vault with an appointment system and a viewing room costs more to run than document custody, and charges accordingly. Whether you need one for a will is another question.

The fees that catch families out

The annual price is the part people compare. The fees that actually hurt are the ones that arrive later, usually at the worst moment.

Search fees. A charge to find out whether a document is held at all. Your executors pay this in the days after a death, often without knowing whether the answer will be yes.

Retrieval or release fees. A charge to hand the document over. Sometimes this is a modest postage cost, which is fair. Sometimes it is a substantial administrative fee.

Access or viewing fees. A charge to look at your own documents, or to have a copy sent.

Exit fees. A charge to move your documents elsewhere, which quietly makes switching provider expensive.

None of these are unreasonable in principle. What is unreasonable is not being told about them when you sign up. Ask for the full schedule of charges in writing before you commit, not just the headline annual price.

Free storage: what it covers, and what it does not

If your solicitor stores your will for free, that is worth having. Two things are worth checking.

The first is whether you and your executors actually know which firm holds it. Wills stored free of charge are lost surprisingly often, not because the firm mislaid them, but because nobody in the family remembered which firm it was.

The second is continuity. Law firms merge, are acquired and occasionally close. A will is meant to last decades. Ask what happens to your documents if that firm is not there in twenty years, and how your family would trace them. A good firm will have a clear answer. We wrote a whole guide on what happens if a storage company disappears, because it is the question people forget to ask.

What we charge, and why

We priced this the way we think it should be priced.

Registering a record of where your documents are kept is free. Secure storage is £19.95 a year, or £149 once if you would rather pay one time and never think about it again. A family plan covering two adults at one address is £29.95 a year, or £249 for life.

Scanned copies of your documents, sent by email whenever you ask, are always free. Releasing your will to your executors after a death is free. We do not charge a search fee, an access fee or an exit fee. If you want an original posted out at some other time, there is a small dispatch fee at cost, and we will tell you what it is before we send it.

We are not publishing this to knock anyone else. We are publishing it because you deserve to know what a fair price looks like before you agree to pay two or three times as much. The full list is on our pricing page, with no contact form in the way.

How to compare two quotes properly

Put both providers side by side and ask the same six questions.

1. What is the annual or one-off price, and does it rise with inflation or at the provider's discretion?
2. What does it cost my executors to find out whether you hold a document?
3. What does it cost to release the original to my executors?
4. What does it cost me to view or get a copy while I am alive?
5. What does it cost to move my documents to another provider?
6. Is the storage insured, and what is the documented plan if you stop trading?

A provider that answers all six clearly and in writing is telling you something useful about how it operates. One that will not is telling you something too.

Worth remembering

Price is not the only thing that matters here, and it is probably not the most important thing. A will that is cheap to store but impossible for your family to find has failed. What you are really buying is the combination of three things: the document is safe, there is a record that it exists, and the right people can get hold of it when they need it.

If that is what you are after, you can register your documents for free to create the record, or tell us what you would like to store and we will confirm the price and how to send things safely. It takes a couple of minutes.

General information, not legal advice. Prices correct at the time of writing.