Bringing an Inheritance from Abroad Home to the UK

Inheriting money or property from abroad brings a currency decision at a point when it's the last thing on your mind. An estate is settled in the local currency, and at some stage a sum in euros, dollars, or another currency is released to you and has to become sterling. The amount is often significant, the timing is set by someone else's probate process rather than by you, and the rate on the day it converts decides what the inheritance is actually worth at home.

This page is about receiving an inheritance from overseas and bringing it back to the UK. It sits close to selling a property abroad, and the two overlap when an inherited property is later sold, but the starting point is different: here the trigger is a death and an estate, not a sale you chose to make, and the tax and paperwork follow from that. If you've decided to sell a property you already own, our selling property abroad page fits better.

The friction is that the process is long and largely out of your hands. Probate abroad can run to many months, funds are often released in more than one payment, and you rarely control the exact day the money moves. That makes this less about picking a perfect moment and more about being set up so that, when the estate does pay out, the conversion is handled properly rather than in a rush.

The decision here is shaped by something you don't control: when the estate actually pays out. Probate abroad runs to its own timetable, so rather than trying to pick a moment, the practical aim is to be set up in advance, with the account open and the paperwork checked, so the conversion can happen cleanly whenever the money is released. Because an inheritance arrives as a single large sum, our guide to large transfers is the right starting point for how those payments work. If you know roughly when a distribution is due and want to fix the sterling value ahead of it, a forward contract locks the rate for that date. If the timing is genuinely open, which it often is with an estate, a target-rate order lets you set a rate you'd be happy with and convert only if the market reaches it, without watching it yourself.

The source-of-funds evidence for an inheritance is different from a salary or a sale, and it helps to know what to expect. Our compliance team will usually want the document that shows the money is a legitimate inheritance: a grant of probate or its local equivalent, the will, or a letter from the solicitor, notary, or executor handling the estate confirming your share. That source of funds proof sits alongside the photo ID and proof of address for opening the account. There's no fixed cap on the amount, though a sum this size goes through additional checks, so lining up the estate paperwork early means nothing stalls when the distribution comes through.

Tax on an inheritance from abroad is one for professional advice, and the UK rules changed recently. From 6 April 2025 the UK moved from a domicile-based system to a residence-based one for inheritance tax: whether a person's non-UK assets fall within UK inheritance tax now turns on whether they were a "long-term resident", broadly UK resident for at least 10 of the previous 20 tax years, rather than on domicile. Where a foreign estate or inheritance tax has also been charged where the assets sit, relief may be available so the same assets aren't taxed twice. The specifics depend on the deceased's position and on yours, so this is a question for an accountant or the solicitor handling the estate, and each corridor guide carries the country side.