What Changed in Ireland’s Probate and Estate Law This Year

TLDR: Ireland tightened its probate system in 2026 with new Courts Service timelines, full solicitor access to online filing, and extra paperwork for foreign-based estates. Inheritance tax thresholds stayed flat, but new rental law rules made estates with tenanted property a lot more complicated to wind down.

If you’ve dealt with an Irish estate this year, you’ve probably noticed the process looks a bit different than it did even twelve months ago. The Probate Office hasn’t rewritten the rulebook from scratch. But a string of smaller changes, taken together, add up to a meaningfully different experience for executors and the solicitors helping them.

The Courts Service Overhauled Its Processing Timelines

On 27 April 2026, the Courts Service published updated guidance on how long probate applications actually take. It wasn’t just a cosmetic update. The announcement came after years of mounting backlogs at the Probate Office in Dublin and at District Probate Registries around the country.

What the New Numbers Actually Show

As of this past July, solicitor applications lodged in late April were running roughly twelve weeks behind. Personal applicants, meanwhile, were facing a ten to twelve week wait just to get an appointment. So while the update was meant to add transparency, it also confirmed what a lot of practitioners already suspected: the system is still stretched thin, especially outside Dublin where smaller registries have fewer staff to work through filings.

Why the Backlog Matters for Families

A slower grant means longer delays accessing bank accounts, selling property, or paying out to beneficiaries. For families already dealing with a death, that wait isn’t just an administrative inconvenience. It can hold up mortgage repayments, rental income, or simply closing out an estate that everyone wants settled.

Solicitors Can Now File Everything Through the Courts Portal

One genuine step forward came on 2 June 2026, when the Courts Service confirmed that all solicitors can file grant of probate applications through the Courts Portal. Before this, online filing was limited and plenty of applications still moved through paper channels, which only added to the delays.

This matters more than it might sound. Pairing portal access with the Revenue side of the process, where the Statement of Affairs (Probate) Form SA.2 already has to be filed online through ROS or MyAccount, means the full application can move digitally from start to finish. The Law Society has also flagged that new IT systems are in development to allow wider use of statements of truth, which should cut down on some of the sworn affidavit work that currently slows things down.

Rental Properties Got a Lot More Complicated to Administer

If an estate includes tenanted property, 2026 brought a real headache. Residential tenancy reforms took effect on 1 March 2026, and they apply in full once a landlord dies and the property passes to an executor. Tenant obligations, deposit protection, registration requirements, all of it transfers over.

New Eviction and Notice Rules

Existing tenancies keep their old eviction grounds and notice periods. But tenancies that started after 1 March fall under the new regime, which changes how (and how quickly) an executor can end a tenancy to sell or distribute a property. That distinction matters a lot when you’re trying to value a rental for probate purposes, since a property with a protected tenant in place can be worth considerably less on paper than one that’s vacant.

Valuing a Property You Can’t Easily Sell

Executors are now having to get valuations that account for whether a tenancy falls under the old rules or the new ones, something that barely came up in estate administration a couple of years ago. It’s added a genuinely new layer to a job that used to be fairly straightforward: collect the assets, pay the debts, distribute what’s left.

Cross-Border Estates Face Extra Paperwork

Ireland never opted into the EU Succession Regulation, so estates with Irish assets have always needed a standalone Irish probate application, no matter which country’s law governs the rest of the estate. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the evidence required.

The 2026 reforms now call for additional affidavit evidence when the deceased was domiciled abroad. For families dealing with an Irish parent’s cottage or savings account while the bulk of the estate sits somewhere else in Europe, that’s one more document to track down, and often one more reason for things to slow down further.

Inheritance Tax Thresholds Stayed Put

Despite the procedural shake-up, Budget 2026 made no change to Capital Acquisitions Tax thresholds. So the tax side of things is the one part of Irish estate law that’s stayed exactly where it was. Executors still need to run the numbers carefully, but at least that piece of the puzzle hasn’t moved underneath them this year.

Taken as a whole, 2026 didn’t rewrite Irish succession law. It just made the plumbing more digital, a bit more documented, and in the case of rental property, noticeably harder to navigate without professional help.