Inherited property: which date do you value it on?

By Parish Rao · 24 August 2026 · 6 minute read

This single confusion causes more wasted money in inherited property than anything else. Families order one valuation, then discover it was on the wrong date for what they actually needed, and pay again.

Three dates, three different jobs

An inherited property can be valued on several dates, and each one answers a different question. They are not interchangeable, and a report prepared for one purpose can be useless for another.

Date of death

This is what the legal side of an inheritance usually wants. Probate petitions and succession work ask what the estate was worth when the person died, because that is what the estate consisted of at that moment.

The court fee in a probate matter is calculated from this figure, so it has direct financial consequences. It is a past date valuation, reconstructed from the records of that time, not a guess based on today's prices.

Today's value

This is what the family needs, and it is the one people underestimate. When one heir keeps the house and pays the others, or when three different properties are split between three siblings, only current market value makes the division fair.

This is also the number that stops family arguments, because it comes with comparable sales attached. It moves the discussion from what people feel the house is worth to what similar houses actually sold for.

1 April 2001

This one is for tax, and only becomes relevant when someone sells. Inherited property carries the previous owner's cost. If the family acquired it before April 2001, the seller can use the 2001 market value as the cost instead of the original price.

On an old family house this usually reduces the taxable gain enormously. Our post on proving cost without a purchase deed covers how that value is built when the old papers are gone.

The mistake that costs money

A family gets one valuation for probate, at date of death. Two years later a sibling sells and needs the 2001 value. Nobody kept the file, the valuer was chosen for being cheap, and the whole exercise starts again from scratch.

The fix is simple. Decide at the start which dates the family will eventually need, and get them from one inspection. The engineer visits once, measures once, and issues the certificates the process requires. That is far cheaper than three separate visits over five years, and it matters when heirs live in different cities.

What we ask you on the call

• When did the person pass away, and is there a will?
• When did the property come into the family, and roughly when was it built?
• Is anyone likely to sell, or is this a division between heirs?
• Where is the property, because probate rules differ by city?
• Do all heirs agree, or is this heading towards a court?

Those five answers tell us exactly which certificates you need, and which you do not. That conversation is free and takes about two minutes.

Read how inherited property valuation works, or check whether probate applies to your property first.