England and Wales only. Published Mon 24th Aug 2026. This describes the process and is not legal advice.
A lasting power of attorney is the document that lets people you have chosen act for you if you cannot. This guide explains how it works in England and Wales: what the document is, the two types, the decisions inside it, the certificate provider, registration, how long it takes and what it costs, including what you pay if you do it yourself through gov.uk.
It is written by a will writer, not a solicitor. It explains the process. It is not legal advice, and if your circumstances are unusual you should take some.
A lasting power of attorney, usually shortened to LPA, is a legal document. In it you name one or more people to make decisions for you, or to help you make them, if there comes a time when you cannot. The forms call you the donor and the people you choose your attorneys. Your attorneys do not have to be lawyers. Most are a husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister or close friend.
You make an LPA while you are well. You must be 18 or over and have mental capacity, meaning you can understand and make your own decisions, at the time you sign it. That timing is the whole point. Once someone has lost capacity it is too late to make one, and the family is left with the court route described near the end of this guide.
An LPA does nothing until it has been registered with the Office of the Public Guardian, the government body that oversees attorneys and deputies in England and Wales. Until then it is a set of signed forms and nothing more.
Two boundaries worth stating plainly. An LPA made in England and Wales is legally binding in England and Wales only. And it ends on your death; what happens after that is the job of your will.
There are two kinds of LPA and they cover different things.
Property and financial affairs. Your money and your property: bank and building society accounts, bills, benefits and pensions, tax, investments, and buying or selling your home. Once registered, this one can be used while you still have capacity if you say it can, which some people want if they become physically unwell or find the paperwork hard. Otherwise it waits until it is needed.
Health and welfare. Your daily routine, your medical care, where you live and whether you move into a care home, and, if you choose, life-sustaining treatment. This one can only be used when you lack the capacity to make the decision in question. Your attorneys cannot overrule you while you are able to decide for yourself.
You can make one or both. We prepare both every time, because the situations that call for one almost always call for the other. An illness that stops you managing money usually stops you managing your care too, and an attorney with financial authority cannot speak to a doctor for you.
Anyone aged 18 or over who has mental capacity. For a property and financial affairs LPA they cannot be an undischarged bankrupt or subject to a debt relief order.
That is the legal minimum. Judgement does the rest. The Office of the Public Guardian's own guide suggests asking three things: whether you trust them to act in your best interests, how well they look after their own affairs, and, if you are naming more than one, whether they will be able to work together.
You can name one attorney or several. Most people name two or three. One attorney on their own is a single point of failure: if they die, lose capacity or cannot carry on, the LPA can stop working. Two or more, with reserves, is the usual shape.
Reserve attorneys. The forms call them replacement attorneys. They step in if an original attorney can no longer act. They cost nothing to add, and they are the difference between an LPA that keeps working for twenty years and one that quietly fails the first time life changes. The next section explains why they matter even more under a joint appointment.
Attorneys have duties once they act. They must follow any instructions you wrote, act in your best interests, help you make your own decisions where you can, keep your money separate from theirs, keep records, and never use the position to benefit themselves. They cannot use the LPA until it is registered.
If you name more than one attorney you have to say how they work together. This is the decision most people have not heard of before they see the form, and it is the one that matters most.
Jointly and severally. Each attorney can act on their own or together with the others. One can pay a bill while another is on holiday. If one dies or steps down, the others carry on. This suits families who trust one another.
Jointly. Every decision is made by all the attorneys together, and every signature is needed for everything. It is slower, and that is the point: it is a safeguard where there is any doubt about how the attorneys will get on. It also carries a risk that people miss. The law treats joint attorneys as a single unit. If one of them dies or can no longer act, all of them stop. The LPA then ends unless you have named reserve attorneys, and when reserves step in under a joint appointment they replace all the original attorneys at the same time. That is why, if you choose jointly, reserves are not optional.
Jointly for some decisions, jointly and severally for others. You can ask for big decisions, such as selling your home, to need everyone, and leave the everyday to any one of them. It works, but every line you write is something the Office of the Public Guardian has to read and accept, so the wording has to be precise.
If you say nothing, the law assumes jointly, which is rarely what people mean.
In practice the choice comes down to two plain questions. Do the people you have chosen get on? Is any of them abroad or often away? An attorney living in Australia can do nothing at all under a joint appointment if the others are here. We cover both questions in Jointly or jointly and severally: how your attorneys act.
The form gives you space for preferences, which your attorneys should bear in mind, and instructions, which they must follow. Most people leave both blank, and that is usually the right answer.
An instruction has to be legally workable. Wording the Office of the Public Guardian cannot accept will hold up registration or stop it, and this is the section it queries most. Very few people have a genuine restriction to add. If you do, have the wording checked before it goes on the form rather than writing it in your own words.
Every LPA needs a certificate provider. This is an independent person who signs to confirm that you understand what the document does, that nobody is pressuring you into it, and that there is nothing fraudulent about it. It is a safeguard for you, and the Office of the Public Guardian will not register an LPA without one.
There are two routes. The first is someone who has known you well for at least two years: a friend, a colleague, a neighbour. The government's guide says they must be more than an acquaintance. The second is a professional with the skills to judge your understanding, such as your doctor or a solicitor, who may charge a fee for doing it.
The list of people who cannot do it is long, and it catches families out. Your certificate provider cannot be:
They must be 18 or over. They sign after you and before your attorneys. Choose the wrong person and the LPA is invalid, and you usually find out when the Office of the Public Guardian writes back, weeks later. Who can be your certificate provider goes through this in full.
You can name up to five people to be told when the LPA is sent for registration. They cannot be your attorneys or reserve attorneys. Once told, they have three weeks to raise a concern with the Office of the Public Guardian, for instance if they believe you were put under pressure.
This is optional. Many people name nobody, and that is a normal answer. Every name you add is another set of details on the form to get right and another letter that has to arrive.
The health and welfare LPA asks one question that deserves a quiet moment on its own. Do you give your attorneys the authority to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on your behalf?
The form offers two options and you choose one:
If you choose option B, those decisions stay with the doctors treating you, who must act in your best interests. Either way, the law is clear that attorneys only have this power if the document says so in terms. This section of the form is signed and dated on its own, and your signature on it is witnessed, so it is one of the places where signing errors happen.
This is where most applications go wrong, so it has its own section. The government's guide puts it plainly: if the people involved do not sign in the correct order, the Office of the Public Guardian will not register the LPA and your attorneys will not be able to use it.
Witnesses must be 18 or over. Your attorneys can witness each other's signatures, but they cannot witness yours and they cannot be your certificate provider. You cannot witness anything yourself.
Dates out of sequence, unsigned sections and details written in the wrong box are among the commonest reasons an application is sent back. A rejected application means the forms come back, the fee is at least partly lost, and the clock starts again.
An LPA has to be registered with the Office of the Public Guardian before anyone can use it. Registering it straight away, while you are well, is the usual approach. It then sits in a drawer until it is needed, and if something is wrong with it you are still able to sign a correction.
If you wait, your attorneys can apply to register it later. But any mistake found at that point may be one you can no longer fix, because the forms need your signature and your capacity. An unregistered LPA with an error in it is the worst of both worlds: money spent and nothing usable.
The application goes to the Office of the Public Guardian with the fee. There is a legal four-week wait before registration can complete, which is the window for anyone to object. If nothing is wrong, the registered LPA comes back to you with the official stamp on every page.
Once it is registered, your attorneys have to prove it to the organisations they deal with. Banks, building societies and pension providers ask to see the stamped document or a certified copy, or an access code from the government's online Use a lasting power of attorney service, which covers LPAs registered since Fri 1st Jan 2016.
Gov.uk says 8 to 10 weeks to register if there are no mistakes. The Office of the Public Guardian's average in the year to March 2025 was 49 working days, roughly ten weeks, against its own target of 40. A second government page tells attorneys to allow up to 16 weeks.
Our working range is 8 to 20 weeks from posting the application to getting the stamped document back. A mistake, a query or a busy period pushes it towards the top of that range. Treat anything quicker as a bonus and do not plan around it. Nobody can promise a date, and anyone who does is guessing.
The government fee. £92 per LPA, paid to the Office of the Public Guardian. That is £184 for both types for one person and £368 for a couple's four documents. It went up from £82 for applications received from Mon 17th Nov 2025. If the person making the LPA has income before tax of under £12,000 a year, the fee is halved. People receiving certain means-tested benefits pay nothing; Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payment do not count towards that. If an application is sent back with a mistake, the Office of the Public Guardian may let you correct it and apply again within three months for £46.
Our fee. £395 for a couple's four documents prepared and checked, or £795 prepared, checked and handled through to registration. For one person, £245 and £645. All four prices include VAT. The government fee is on top in every case, and it is the same whoever prepares the forms, including you.
So a couple doing everything themselves pays £368. A couple using us pays £368 plus £395 or £795. We put those numbers side by side on purpose.
You can do all of this yourself for nothing beyond the registration fee. Gov.uk has an online tool that asks the questions and produces the completed forms, or you can fill in the paper forms, LP1F for finances and LP1H for health. Either way you then print, sign in the right order with witnesses, find a certificate provider who qualifies, and post the application to the Office of the Public Guardian with the fee.
If you are organised, confident with forms and have people around you who can check your work, the free route is a good one and we will say so to anyone who asks.
What the tool cannot do is make the decisions for you or catch a decision that is wrong for your family. It will not tell you that a joint appointment is a bad fit for a son in Canada, that your neighbour of 18 months does not qualify as a certificate provider, or that your instruction on page 7 will be queried. Figures released by the Office of the Public Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act put rejections at more than 50,000 applications a year, and a later release covering 2024 put the number far higher, at 133,760. The reasons are mostly small: a date or name written unclearly, a section unsigned, information in the wrong place. Those are not stupid mistakes. They are what happens when careful people meet a form built for lawyers.
What you pay a service for is the part the form cannot do: the decisions explained in plain words, a person reading every page before you sign, and, if you want it, someone handling the posting and the waiting.
If someone loses capacity without an LPA, nobody can step in automatically. Not a husband or wife, not a son or daughter. Being next of kin carries no legal authority in England and Wales.
The route then is an application to the Court of Protection to be appointed as a deputy. It costs £432 to apply for each type of deputyship, £100 for the assessment of a new deputy, £266 if the court decides a hearing is needed, and then £320 a year in supervision fees for most deputies. It takes months rather than weeks, and the court decides who is appointed. If no suitable family member or friend comes forward, it can appoint a professional panel deputy from its own list.
That is the comparison the £92 fee should be set against. What happens if you do not have one explains deputyship properly.
Power of Attorney Service prepares lasting powers of attorney for people in England and Wales. The documents are prepared and checked by Andrew Brackenbury, a full member of the Society of Will Writers. We are not solicitors and we do not give legal advice. We explain the process, turn the decisions into plain questions, and read every page before it is signed.
If you would rather not do it alone, that is what we are for: Power of Attorney Service.
Every fact above was checked against the source listed on the date shown.
Power of Attorney Service is a trading name of Dead Easy Legal Ltd, registered in England and Wales.