What an executor must do

Researched and written 2026-09-30 16:02 SGT · 7 sources listed at the end · draft 1 · figures verified against the named sources on the date shown; where a source has since moved, the element carries a marker.

Researched and written 2026-09-30 · 7 sources listed at the end · draft 1 · figures verified against the named sources on the date shown; where a source has since moved, the element carries a marker.

You have just been named executor of a will — usually because someone read it out, or a lawyer called you. Most people who hear this have never done it before, and there is no reason they should have. This page is the job description: what you are actually required to do, in order, what you are not required to do, and where you can get it wrong in a way that costs you personally. Nothing here is legal advice for your specific estate — get that from a probate lawyer — but it is the map of the job before you walk into the lawyer's office.

The mechanics: what the job is, and when it starts

An executor is the person a valid will names to carry out its instructions. A will is only valid if it was made in writing by someone at least 21, signed at its foot, and witnessed by two people present at the same time who each sign in the testator's presence — and a gift to a witness, or a witness's spouse, is void even if the rest of the will stands. Your appointment as executor exists the moment the person dies; what you don't yet have is legal power to act on it. That power is a Grant of Probate, and you can only apply for one where both things are true: the deceased left a valid will, and it names you as executor. No valid will means the estate goes through Letters of Administration instead, under a different applicant and a different priority order — that is not your process. [⚠ estate.probate.eligibility_2026_06_15: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Your very first job is finding the will and confirming it's the last one. Most people don't register a will at all — that's legal — but since May 2020 the Singapore Academy of Law has run a Wills Registry that records that a will exists and where the original physically sits, without holding the document itself; and since 9 September 2026 SAL's newer Wills Repository Service lets a testator who worked through a participating law firm store an actual digital copy, accessible only to the people they named. If the deceased used either service, a search — restricted to the testator, their lawyer, an estate representative, or a next-of-kin or beneficiary once they've died — can save you weeks of searching a filing cabinet. If they didn't, you're down to the physical original, and a will you can't locate is treated the same as no will at all.

The Family Justice Courts' guide sets out four stages: file the Originating Application with the required documents; submit the supporting affidavit, schedule of assets and administration oath within 14 days of filing; attend a hearing only if something is incomplete or contested; then collect the sealed grant. You should present the original will at the Probate Counter by 4.30pm the next business day after filing, and the whole application should be lodged within 6 months of the date of death. Processing then typically runs 2 to 3 months for a straightforward estate once filed — but a law firm's own practitioner range puts the full distance, start to grant, at 3 to 6 months for something simple, a year or more where it's complex, and up to 2 years where it's contested. Gross estate value of S$5 million or less is filed in the Family Courts; above that, the Family Division of the High Court. A sole, self-represented executor with a Singapore- or PR-domiciled deceased, dying after 15 Feb 2008, not Muslim, and an estate at or under S$2 million can use the simpler Probate eService route without a lawyer. [⚠ estate.probate.filing_steps_2026_06_05: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Court fees themselves are modest against everything else in this job: the Originating Application runs about S$210 to S$240, plus S$15 to S$25 each for the schedule of assets, the certified death certificate and the certified will copy, and about S$50 for a certified true copy of the grant once issued — banks and agencies will ask for several of those. A lawyer's professional fee sits well above the court fees: uncontested probate work is commonly quoted at S$2,500 to S$5,000 for a simple estate, with disbursements of S$300 to S$5,000 or more on top, depending on how much of the estate is disputed or overseas. [⚠ estate.probate.certified_copy_fee: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Three things protect you personally while you do this job, and one thing is owed to you for doing it. You must act with reasonable care and impartially between beneficiaries — the Trustees Act gives any beneficiary standing to sue you if you don't. Publishing a notice of intention to distribute, in the Government Gazette or a newspaper, isn't compulsory for every estate, but it starts a roughly two-month window for unknown creditors to come forward, and protects you from a claim that surfaces after you've already paid everyone out. Funeral expenses are reimbursable from the estate — reported as capped around S$6,000 for estates over S$50,000, with the Public Trustee handling reimbursement directly on smaller ones. And the one thing owed to you: a court may award an executor a commission of up to 5% of the value of the assets you actually collected — but only if you ask for it or the will provides for it; nobody hands it to you automatically. [⚠ estate.exec.duty_of_care_s3a: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

• Locate the original will and check it hasn't been revoked or superseded
• Register the death and obtain certified copies of the death certificate
• Identify and value every asset and every debt as at the date of death
• Apply for the Grant of Probate within 6 months of death
• Pay the estate's debts, taxes and expenses before distributing anything
• Distribute the specific gifts and the residue exactly as the will directs
• Keep full accounts — you can be asked to justify every decision, for years afterward

Are you actually eligible to act

Being named is not the same as being allowed to serve. Any adult of sound mind who isn't disqualified can be an executor — including a trust corporation or a professional firm — but the minimum age is 21, and an undischarged bankrupt is generally treated as unsuitable given that the role means handling other people's money. Living overseas doesn't disqualify you, but it creates real friction: swearing affidavits, dealing with Singapore banks, HDB and the courts from a distance is why wills that name an overseas executor often add a local co-executor or a professional firm alongside them, plus a named alternate. Being a beneficiary doesn't disqualify you either, though it puts you in the obvious position of deciding on assets you personally stand to gain from. If you don't want the job, you can renounce it — orally, in attested writing, or simply by not applying in time — and the court can remove an executor under the Probate and Administration Act where, for example, no application is made within 6 months of death. [⚠ estate.exec.renounce_and_removal: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Where the deceased was Muslim and died intestate, the estate is distributed under Islamic inheritance law (faraid), and the Syariah Court must first issue an Inheritance Certificate naming beneficiaries and shares before any Grant of Probate or Letters of Administration can even be sought. Where there's no valid will at all, the applicant for Letters of Administration must be a beneficiary entitled to a share, at least 21 and mentally capable, and priority generally follows the size of entitlement — a spouse usually first in a non-Muslim estate, with lower-priority beneficiaries able to apply only after those with prior rights have renounced. [⚠ estate.exec.la.eligibility: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

Citizenship: who is actually allowed to inherit what

Your own citizenship rarely matters to your eligibility as executor. Whose citizenship matters a great deal is the beneficiary's, and only for one asset class: restricted residential property, broadly meaning landed housing. Under the Residential Property Act, no estate or interest in that kind of property can pass by will or intestacy to a foreign person — a bar that has applied to anyone dying on or after 11 September 1973. Critically, the Act defines 'transfer' to include assent, so an executor simply vesting the property in a foreign beneficiary trips the same bar as a sale would; you cannot quietly hand it over. Where a sale to a citizen or approved purchaser is required instead, you pay the foreign beneficiary the net proceeds — after expenses of the sale and of administering the estate — under the ordinary law of wills and intestate succession. There are two carve-outs worth knowing: a foreign surviving joint tenant is exempt from the bar entirely (though a tenant-in-common or a will beneficiary gets no such exemption), and the restriction never reaches a non-landed flat, a condominium unit or an EC unit — a foreign or PR beneficiary can inherit those outright, no approval needed.

If a landed property genuinely cannot pass to a foreign beneficiary and must be sold instead, the disposal has to happen within 5 years from the date of death — confirmed by a direct read of s3(4) of the Residential Property Act itself, which binds the legal personal representatives holding the grant to sell within that window (or any extension the Controller allows, with the Minister's approval). Separately, nationals of the US, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland — plus their PRs — are taxed as Singapore Citizens under FTA parity for stamp duty, which matters if the estate later distributes cash and one beneficiary uses it to buy their own property; it does not touch the Residential Property Act's approval regime, which runs on its own separate residence test.

The taxes the estate does — and doesn't — owe

The single biggest relief in this whole job: Singapore abolished estate duty for deaths on or after 15 February 2008. There is no inheritance tax and no estate tax here today, at any estate size, however much the deceased owned. Property-specific duties are lighter than a live buyer or seller ever faces, but not zero.

• ABSD: not payable where residential property passes to a beneficiary under a will or intestacy — but the property still counts as one they already own the next time they buy
• BSD: not payable on the transfer to a beneficiary by way of assent
• SSD: the clock is not reset by inheritance — it's counted from the deceased's own acquisition date, so if the deceased bought before 12 Jan 2013, or the holding period has already run out, a quick sale by the heir owes no SSD at all; if it hasn't, the ordinary four-year schedule (16/12/8/4%) still bites
• Property tax: a deceased owner isn't eligible for owner-occupier rates as a matter of law, but IRAS runs a concession continuing them for up to 2 years from death or transfer, whichever comes first — after that, the higher non-owner-occupier residential rate applies if the flat or house is still sitting in the deceased's name

Beyond the property duties, you personally inherit a tax filing duty of your own that has nothing to do with the will's terms: you notify IRAS through myTax Mail of your own particulars and the deceased's income from all sources up to the date of death, and any income tax the deceased still owed is recovered from the estate before anything is distributed. Where the estate itself earns income during administration — most commonly rent, if the property sits vacant or is let out during the gap between death and distribution — you file Form T (estate and trust income tax) by 15 April of the following year. Ordinary landlord tax rules apply to whoever is collecting that rent on the estate's behalf; this is genuinely a question for the estate's own tax adviser rather than something this page settles, since IRAS's guidance is written for living owners, not administration periods.

If the estate needs cash before the grant arrives — the borrowing gap

This is the part almost nobody warns you about. Property tax, MCST or S&CC arrears, and funeral costs don't wait for the court, but the property itself — the estate's biggest asset — cannot legally be sold or transferred until you actually hold the grant, and getting there takes 2 to 3 months on top of an HDB resale's own 8 to 10 weeks, run one after the other because you can't market a flat you don't yet have power over. A fresh search found no Singapore bank product built to bridge an executor over that specific gap; what exists in the UK (probate bridging finance) has no confirmed Singapore equivalent. On an illustrative S$50,000 shortfall over roughly 5 months: a family member or beneficiary advancing the cash and being repaid once the estate is wound up is the commonest route reported, though it isn't a regulated product; a private non-bank lender's published 6-8% a year would cost roughly S$1,460 to S$1,670 in interest over that stretch; a licensed moneylender's legal ceiling of 4% a month would run about S$10,000 in interest plus a possible S$5,000 admin fee — far more expensive, and no source confirms a licensed moneylender will actually lend against an estate asset you don't yet hold title to. Ask a probate lawyer which of these is realistic for your specific estate before you commit to any of them.

Once the estate is settled and the property has actually passed to a beneficiary, that person's own borrowing is a completely separate question from anything above — a beneficiary who wants to buy out co-beneficiaries' shares, or refinance the inherited home in their own name, applies for an ordinary loan subject to the same LTV and TDSR ceilings, and MSR if it's an HDB flat or EC, as any other borrower. That doesn't fall on you as executor; it falls on whoever ends up holding the keys.

Renovation and control: mostly not yours to spend on

As executor your job is to preserve the estate's value, not improve it. Spending estate money on renovation, A&A or a rebuild before you've settled debts and distributed what the will requires is a decision you generally don't have the authority to make alone — it's estate money, and every beneficiary has a stake in how it's spent. If the beneficiaries who will actually receive the property want to renovate before selling, or want the estate handled differently from how the will directs — for instance, being told to hold a flat as tenants-in-common but agreeing among themselves to sell instead — the standard route is a Deed of Family Arrangement, which protects you as executor from a later claim that you exceeded your role. This is the one place where control genuinely shifts: you control the process and the timing of getting to a grant; what happens to the physical asset afterward is a decision for whoever inherits it, not for you.

Conveyancing: you cannot sell until you hold the grant

This is the hard boundary the whole job runs on: estate property, HDB or private, cannot legally be transferred or sold until you hold the Grant of Probate (or Letters of Administration if there's no will). With HDB specifically, an executor or administrator with a valid Singpass can endorse resale documents on the HDB Flat Portal — a non-resident executor has to sign in person — and HDB will ask for the original grant and will (or the grant of administration and statement), plus the death certificate, on top of the ordinary resale paperwork. For an HDB flat, the deadline to sell is firm: within 6 years of the deceased's death. A full estate sale, once you're legally able to start, still typically runs 6 to 9 months from marketing to completion, on top of whatever time the grant itself took.

Not everything needs a grant first, which matters if you're worried the whole estate is stuck. Joint-tenancy property without a mortgage passes automatically to the surviving joint tenant by survivorship; CPF savings, certain nominated insurance policies, and certain joint or sole bank accounts meeting the institution's own requirements can move without waiting for you at all. The property is usually the one asset that actually gates everything else.

The rest of the estate: CPF, insurance, and the LPA that just ended

CPF savings are not covered by the will and are not part of the estate you administer at all — they sit on a completely separate track, protected from creditors, and pass by CPF nomination if one was made, or through the Public Trustee under intestacy rules if not. CPF used to fund a property has its refund obligation automatically waived on death; the property itself is what follows the will or manner-of-holding rule, not CPF's own process. If there's a nomination, CPF Board contacts the nominee within 10 working days; with no nomination, the Public Trustee's process can take up to 6 months and charges an example administration fee of S$900.72 on S$100,000 of savings. Where the deceased was a foreigner holding a CPF account, the death has to be separately reported to CPF Board — a citizen or PR's death is already captured through ICA's online certification, so no separate CPF notice is needed there.

If the deceased had signed a Lasting Power of Attorney, it ends automatically and immediately on death — for personal welfare and for property and financial matters alike. Whatever a donee was managing under that LPA is frozen again the moment the donor dies, and stays frozen until you, as executor, actually obtain the grant. The donee's authority does not carry over to you, and it does not extend the LPA past the death it was meant to plan for.

Where beneficiaries disagree — about the will's terms, about a forced sale of jointly-held property, or simply about each other — the Family Justice Courts' Family Dispute Resolution Division offers free mediation covering probate and letters of administration applications specifically, using specially appointed judges or volunteer legal professionals. The Singapore Mediation Centre runs a paid alternative (S$272.50 administrative fee plus roughly S$2,784 per party per day), explicitly covering wills and probate disputes, not only divorce; about 70% of its family mediations settle, and over 90% of those within a single day. A co-owner who can't get agreement on a sale can eventually apply to the General Division of the High Court, which weighs the type of co-ownership, each party's financial contribution, and how any rental income was used — but that route is slower and more expensive than either mediation option, and is worth trying to avoid.

THE VOICE: reading this job the way an operator would

Two questions cut through all of this, and they're not "are you keeping the property or selling it" — nobody signs up for the executor's job hoping the estate loses value, so that question sorts nobody. The real questions are: are you (or the estate) borrowing against anything here, and once you hold the property, is it being let out to a tenant? Most of this job is neither — it's a one-off event, not an ongoing position — which is exactly why the frame below reads differently from a page about buying or holding property yourself.

• C0 THE PLAY — this is a balance-sheet event, not a cash-flow decision: assets and debts crystallise at the date of death, and your job is to account for and settle that snapshot, not to run the asset
• C1 BALANCE SHEET — what the estate owns (property, CPF, bank accounts, insurance) minus what it owes (debts, tax, funeral costs, your own fees if any), valued as at the date of death
• C2 CASH FLOW — outgoings on the property (property tax, MCST or S&CC, insurance, utilities) continue immediately after death, while the asset itself is frozen and unsellable until the grant arrives — that gap is the funding problem covered above
• C3 P&L — there is no profit-and-loss concept in administering an estate; any capital gain or loss question is deferred entirely to whoever eventually sells, and only then
• C4 CARRY — if the property is let out while probate is pending, rent minus outgoings accrues to the estate, not to you personally, and is accounted for like every other estate asset
• C5 GIVE/GET — you give your time, exposure to personal liability, and months of paperwork; you get the discharge of a legal duty, and — unless the will provides for it, or a court awards you commission — usually no pay at all
• C6 EXPOSED TO — personal liability if you mismanage estate funds, family conflict over the will's terms, and market timing risk if the 6-year HDB deadline forces a sale into a weak market
• C7 FOR HOW LONG — 3 to 6 months for a simple estate, a year or more for a complex one, up to 2 years where it's contested
• C8 FAILURE CASCADE — mismanaging estate funds or missing deadlines starts as a paperwork problem, hits CASH FLOW when creditors or tax aren't paid on time, accumulates into a P&L-style shortfall against what beneficiaries expected, and in the worst case exposes you personally to a breach-of-duty claim from a beneficiary — an entirely different failure shape from NEGATIVE EQUITY or insolvency, because you are not the owner of the asset
• C9 LIQUIDITY — CPF, insurance and bank accounts can move in weeks with the right nomination or paperwork; the property is the slowest asset in the estate by far, gated behind the grant and then behind an ordinary sale process
• C10 CONTROL — you control the administrative process and its timing; you do not control what happens to the property afterward, and shouldn't spend estate money as if you did
• C11 THE EXIT — for you, the exit is closing the estate's accounts and making final distribution; for the property specifically, the exit is the sale itself, and it cannot even begin until the grant is in hand

Who you'll likely need on your side

Most executors end up hiring at least one professional, even for a simple estate: a probate lawyer to file the application and the supporting affidavit correctly the first time (a rejected or incomplete filing is the commonest reason this drags past 6 months); a separate conveyancing lawyer once you're ready to actually transfer or sell the property; and, if the estate is large, contested, or nobody in the family wants the liability, a professional executor or trust corporation instead of a family member. If beneficiaries disagree, the free Family Dispute Resolution mediation above is worth trying before anyone hires a litigator. If you want a hand thinking through which of these specialists you actually need for your estate, or finding one, think of me as a starting point — I take no referral fee for it and want nothing from steering you toward one lawyer or agency over another; the fee relationship in this job should run between you and whoever you hire, not through me.

What the realtor earns when the property finally sells, and where the incentive points

Once you hold the grant and are ready to sell, CEA sets no fixed or prescribed commission rate for any property type — the amount is agreed between you and the agent, in writing, in a Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement signed before the agent starts marketing. Market norm for a residential resale is the seller paying around 2%, with the buyer's agent paid by co-broke out of that same amount, or directly by the buyer where agreed separately; one agent can never legally collect commission from both sides of the same transaction. Here is the tension worth naming plainly: the agent is paid on the sale completing, at whatever price it completes at, not on you getting probate right, not on you and the other beneficiaries actually agreeing on a price or a timeline first, and not on your patience with a process that has already taken months. An agent's commercial interest is to get the flat listed and sold quickly — which can run directly against your interest in first settling exactly who the beneficiaries are, what shares they hold, and whether everyone actually agrees to sell at all. Bring the agent in once that groundwork is done, not before.

Sources

• Family Justice Courts — Apply for probate (2026-06-15) · https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/family/probate-and-administration
• IRAS — Buyer's Stamp Duty, ABSD and SSD on inherited property (2026-09-29) · https://www.iras.gov.sg
• CPF Board — CPF nomination and estate matters (2026-09-28) · https://www.cpf.gov.sg
• HDB — Selling an HDB flat belonging to a deceased owner (2026-09-29) · https://www.hdb.gov.sg
• CEA — Buying or selling — commission and the Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement (2026-09-29) · https://www.cea.gov.sg
• AGC — Residential Property Act 1976, s3 (2026-09-30) · https://sso.agc.gov.sg
• Singapore Academy of Law — Wills Registry and Wills Repository Service (2026-09-29) · https://www.sal.org.sg