Tell Us Once: what happens when you notify the government of a death

You have just registered a death at the local register office. The registrar hands you a reference number and mentions, almost as an aside, that you can use something called Tell Us Once. After the weeks of hospital visits and funeral arrangements, the prospect of notifying HMRC, the DVLA, the Passport Office, and the council individually feels crushing. Tell Us Once exists precisely to spare families that particular ordeal.

This article explains how the service works, which bodies it reaches, and — just as importantly — where it stops, so that nothing falls through the gap.

What the service actually does

Tell Us Once is a free service run by central government in partnership with local councils. When you use it, a single notification is distributed electronically to a range of departments simultaneously. You can complete it online at Gov.uk or by telephone, and you have 28 days from the date of death registration to do so (though there is no legal penalty for going beyond that window — you simply lose the convenience of the single submission).

To use the service you will need the reference number the registrar gives you, along with some basic information about the person who has died: their National Insurance number, date of birth, passport number if applicable, driving licence number if applicable, and the name and address of their next of kin or the person dealing with the estate.

The departments and agencies that Tell Us Once can notify include:

• HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) — to update tax records, close or transfer relevant accounts, and stop any tax credits or Child Benefit payments
• Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) — to stop State Pension payments and any other DWP benefits such as Universal Credit or Pension Credit
• Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) — to cancel the deceased's driving licence
• HM Passport Office — to cancel the deceased's passport
• The local council — to stop Council Tax discounts or exemptions, update the electoral register, and cancel or transfer any council-administered benefits such as housing benefit or a Blue Badge
• Veterans UK — relevant where the deceased received a war disablement pension or similar
• Public sector pension schemes — some, though not all, are included depending on the scheme

In practice, the registrar will tell you which specific services are available in your area, since local council integration varies slightly across England and Wales.

What Tell Us Once does not cover

The service is genuinely useful, but it is not comprehensive, and treating it as the end of your administrative obligations is a common and costly mistake.

Tell Us Once does not notify private organisations. Banks, building societies, investment platforms, insurance companies, pension providers in the private sector, utility companies, and subscription services must each be contacted individually. For an estate with even modest complexity — a current account, an ISA, a workplace pension, a life insurance policy — that list can run to a dozen separate notifications, each with its own requirements for death certificates and grant of probate.

It does not notify the Probate Registry or initiate the probate process in any way. If a grant of representation is required, that application falls entirely outside Tell Us Once.

It does not handle HMRC's inheritance tax process. Reporting an estate to HMRC for Inheritance Tax purposes, completing the relevant IHT forms, and corresponding with HMRC's Inheritance Tax team are entirely separate from the Tell Us Once notification. The two systems do not speak to one another.

It does not notify professional bodies, the Land Registry (if a property needs to be transferred), or any foreign government — relevant when the deceased held assets or property overseas.

One practical detail worth noting: cancelling a passport through Tell Us Once does not return the document to the family. If you need a cancelled passport returned for sentimental or record-keeping reasons, you should contact His Majesty's Passport Office directly as a separate step.

For families managing an estate, the real discipline lies in keeping a clear record of what Tell Us Once has covered and building a separate checklist for everything it has not. Executors who conflate the two often discover, months later, that a pension provider or a utility company has continued sending correspondence — or worse, continuing payments — to an address no one is monitoring.

Tell Us Once is a sensible administrative shortcut for the most time-sensitive government notifications. It does not, however, constitute estate administration. The paperwork that follows a death — the probate application, the tax returns, the bank notifications, the asset valuations — requires its own careful, methodical approach, ideally documented somewhere a co-executor or surviving family member can find it without a search.

Glenvault is built to hold exactly that kind of structured record, from the moment a death is registered through to the final distribution of an estate. If you are organising a family's documents and succession planning, you can open a vault at glenvault.com/signup.