Reclaiming a Deceased Relative's Care Fees: Estate PUPoC Claims

Most people find this out by accident. Someone dies, probate begins, and an adult child working through a shoebox of paperwork realises how much went to the care home — £60,000, £150,000, sometimes more. Then the question arrives: should the NHS have been paying for that?

TL;DR: An executor or administrator can ask the ICB to review a period of care that was never assessed for NHS Continuing Healthcare, and any refund goes into the estate. Care from 1 April 2012 onwards has no submission deadline (DHSC, March 2025). The binding constraint is evidence rather than time, so request the care records before anything else.

This guide covers the estate route specifically: who has standing to claim, which periods remain open, how to obtain records for someone who has died, and what the NHS actually pays. For the general process while a person is still living, our guide to retrospective CHC claims is the better starting point. If your question is about fees the estate still owes the care home, that's a different problem — see care home fees after death.

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Can you claim back care home fees after someone has died?

Yes. In its quarterly reporting, NHS England confirms that requests to assess previously unassessed periods of care "may relate to either deceased or ongoing eligible cases" (NHS England, CHC and FNC Report Q3 2025/26, published February 2026). Death doesn't extinguish the claim. It changes who brings it and where the money lands.

The mechanism is called a PUPoC — a Previously Unassessed Period of Care. You're asking the Integrated Care Board to look back at a window of time when your relative was paying for care, and decide whether they had a primary health need during it. If they did, the NHS should have been funding that care, and the fees are refunded to the estate.

Citation capsule: NHS England confirms that requests to assess previously unassessed periods of care "may relate to either deceased or ongoing eligible cases" (NHS England, Q3 2025/26 report, February 2026). A retrospective NHS Continuing Healthcare claim therefore survives the death of the person who received the care, brought instead by their estate.

One thing to be clear about from the start. This is a claim over a defined period, not a demand for every invoice the family ever paid. If the records support eligibility for eighteen months of a four-year stay, that's what gets refunded. Anyone promising you the whole lot back is selling something.

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Who has the legal standing to bring the claim?

Government guidance sets a specific test. Where the person has died, there must be "sufficient proof that the representative is an executor or administrator of the estate, or someone who may have a claim arising from the death" (DHSC, updated March 2025). That second limb is broader than most people assume.

Here's where competitor guidance tends to mislead in both directions. Some pages insist you need a grant of probate before the ICB will engage. Others say nothing at all. The national position is more forgiving, and it's worth knowing these rules come from DHSC guidance rather than local discretion — an ICB can't invent its own.

The timing works like this. If the ICB doesn't already have proof of authority, "they can request this documentation to be provided within 8 weeks." Miss it and the application "could be considered withdrawn." But the same guidance builds in a release valve: there may be exceptional circumstances in which ICBs should extend that window, "for example, in the event that there is a delay in obtaining a grant of probate or letters of administration" (DHSC, March 2025). Ask in writing, early, and the clock stops being a problem.

If you're instructing a solicitor or claims company, they face a tighter deadline. A request unaccompanied by authority to act "should be logged and acknowledged but no further action taken if the third party cannot produce its authority to act within 28 days."

Citation capsule: Where the person has died, DHSC guidance requires proof that the representative is "an executor or administrator of the estate, or someone who may have a claim arising from the death," and allows an ICB to request that documentation within 8 weeks (DHSC, updated March 2025). ICBs should consider extending that window where a grant of probate is delayed.

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Which periods of care can still be claimed?

Care from 1 April 2012 onwards has no submission deadline. The DHSC guidance limits the scope of what ICBs consider — it sets no cut-off date for asking. This is the single most misunderstood fact in the whole area, and it's worth checking against anything you've been told about time running out.

Two earlier windows are closed. Care between 1 April 2004 and 31 March 2011 had to be claimed by 30 September 2012 (GOV.UK, September 2012). Care between 1 April 2011 and 31 March 2012 had to be claimed by 31 March 2013 (GOV.UK, March 2013). Both closedowns left a narrow exceptional-circumstances route open, but ICBs expect such cases to be rare.

So a period of care in 2016, claimed in 2026, is squarely in scope. A period in 2009 almost certainly isn't.

Citation capsule: Care from 1 April 2012 onwards carries no deadline for submitting a retrospective NHS Continuing Healthcare request; the guidance limits scope, not timing (DHSC, March 2025). Earlier periods closed under fixed deadlines on 30 September 2012 and 31 March 2013.

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What actually limits an old claim

If there's no legal time limit, why does anyone say "act quickly"? Because the constraint is evidential. Your claim is only as good as the records that survive to describe your relative's needs, and those records sit with several organisations that each apply their own retention practice.

Here's a correction worth making, because a specific figure circulates widely on this topic. You'll see it said that care homes keep records for only three years. That number comes from Regulation 21 of the Private and Voluntary Health Care (England) Regulations 2001 — which DHSC's own PUPoC guidance still directs ICBs to consider. But read the regulation and the three-year period attaches to the records in Part II of its Schedule 3, the administrative ones. Patient medical records fall under Part I, with different and longer periods (legislation.gov.uk). The three-year figure is real; it just isn't about the notes you need.

The standard that actually matters is the NHS Records Management Code of Practice, which sets a retention period of 8 years for adult social care records including care plans, and 8 years for adult health records not otherwise specified (NHS England, 2023). That's the national benchmark for the daily care notes and nursing records a retrospective claim lives on.

One honest caveat, because it affects exactly the families reading this. That Code applies to organisations working within or under contract to the NHS in England, and to adult social care commissioned or delivered by local authorities. A wholly private, self-funded placement with no NHS or council contract sits at the edge of its scope. So treat 8 years as the standard rather than a guarantee, and don't assume on either side.

Citation capsule: The NHS Records Management Code of Practice sets an 8-year retention period for adult social care records including care plans (NHS England, 2023). The widely repeated claim that care homes keep records for only three years derives from a provision governing administrative rather than medical records.

So a period of care from 2019, where your relative died in 2023, is claimable in law and usually still evidenced in practice. The instruction is the same either way: request the records before you do anything else. Not the claim form, not the solicitor. The records.

If a provider can't produce them, that isn't automatically fatal. Practice varies by ICB — Cheshire and Merseyside, for instance, commits to "a minimum of three attempts" with each provider and then asks them to sign a disclaimer confirming the records are unavailable (Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, April 2024). National guidance is less prescriptive, requiring only that ICBs can evidence the attempts they made. Ask your ICB what its own practice is.

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How to get a deceased person's medical records

This trips up more families than any other step. A Subject Access Request does not work for someone who has died — UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act apply to living individuals only. Families send SAR letters, wait a month, and get nothing.

The correct instrument is the Access to Health Records Act 1990. Section 3(1)(f) gives a right of access to "the patient's personal representative and any person who may have a claim arising out of the patient's death" (legislation.gov.uk). Note how closely that mirrors the PUPoC standing test.

Two limits worth knowing before you start. First, the Act reaches health records — those made by or on behalf of a health professional. GP and hospital records are squarely covered. A residential home's daily care notes, or a council's adult social care file, often are not, and there is no equivalent statutory route for those once the person has died. Second, where you apply as someone with a claim arising from the death, the holder may withhold parts of the record that aren't relevant to that claim. A redacted file isn't necessarily obstruction.

That first limit matters more than it sounds, because care notes carry the daily detail a claim turns on. The practical answer is that you don't have to obtain everything yourself: gathering provider records is part of the ICB's job during the review. Ask the ICB in writing to request the care home and local authority records directly, and keep your own AHRA requests for the GP and hospital.

The statutory clocks differ from a SAR, and in one case they're shorter.

Write to each health record holder separately — the GP practice and every hospital trust involved. There may be a charge for copies, so ask what it is up front. For the equivalent process while someone is still living, our NHS Subject Access Request guide has the letter templates — just don't use them for a deceased relative.

Citation capsule: UK GDPR does not apply to deceased individuals, so a Subject Access Request cannot be used to obtain a dead person's medical records. The Access to Health Records Act 1990 gives the personal representative, and anyone with a claim arising from the death, a right of access — with a statutory response window of 21 or 40 days (legislation.gov.uk).

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What happens next: the closed MDT and the Needs Portrayal Document

Here's the part that genuinely differs when the person has died. A multidisciplinary team still assesses the case and still completes a Decision Support Tool — that requirement doesn't fall away. What changes is that you aren't in the room. Cheshire and Merseyside describe it precisely: "a 'closed' multi-disciplinary team (MDT) of professionals will consider the case... the applicant will not be invited to attend this meeting; however, their views and opinions will be considered by the MDT" (Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, April 2024).

Your views reach that panel through one document. National guidance directs the assessor to produce a needs portrayal document and share it with you: "the applicant should be asked to respond within 28 days, where possible, to allow timely completion of the PUPoC request" (DHSC, March 2025). Note the phrasing — 28 days "where possible" is a request for timeliness, not a guillotine. If you need longer to gather something, say so rather than rushing a thin response.

In our casework, that response is the single most under-used opportunity in the whole process. Families treat the needs portrayal as a formality and return it saying they agree. It isn't a formality. There's a panel of professionals who will read it, and no meeting where you get to speak — so this document is the entire conversation.

A strong response does three things. It corrects factual errors in the reconstruction, which are common when notes are patchy. It supplies context the records can't carry — the night-time behaviours, the refusals, the incidents staff managed without writing up. And it maps what happened to the 12 CHC care domains in the language the framework uses.

Citation capsule: Where the person has died, a "closed" multidisciplinary team considers the case and completes a Decision Support Tool without the applicant present (Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, April 2024). The family's written response to the needs portrayal document is how their account reaches that panel.

On timing, national guidance gives two figures with noticeably different force. Completing within 6 months where the period of care is a year or less is offered as "an example of best practice." Where the period exceeds a year, the request "should not take longer than 12 months to complete, except in exceptional circumstances" (DHSC, March 2025). Neither is a deadline you can hold an ICB to, and published local expectations vary — North Central London tells families to expect 6 to 9 months.

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What the estate gets paid — and what it doesn't

Interest is compound RPI, not 8%. NHS England's redress guidance advises commissioners "to apply the Retail Price Index for calculation of compound interest," using "the average rate for the year for which care costs are being reimbursed" (NHS England, Refreshed Redress Guidance, April 2015). The 8% figure that circulates in advertising is the statutory court rate, and it isn't what the NHS applies.

That method bites regardless of how old the care is. It applies wherever the eligibility decision is made on or after 1 April 2015 — "irrespective of the period of care." A decision reached in 2026 about care in 2015 gets RPI. Our PUPoC money math guide works the arithmetic through with a full example.

Now the part worth knowing before you sign anything. Don't assume your legal costs come back. NHS England states that it "does not reimburse any costs you incur by appointing a solicitor" in the Independent Review Process (NHS England, July 2023), and its redress guidance notes the Ombudsman has indicated it is "rarely appropriate" to refund legal and professional costs. Neither is an absolute bar, but both point the same way.

Read that alongside the governing principle — redress restores the person to the position they'd have held but for the error, and "remedies should not lead to a complainant making a profit." A success fee doesn't come from the NHS. It comes out of the estate's recovery, and therefore out of the beneficiaries' inheritance.

Citation capsule: NHS England states it does not reimburse costs incurred by appointing a solicitor in the Continuing Healthcare Independent Review Process (NHS England, July 2023), and its redress guidance notes the Ombudsman has indicated refunding legal and professional costs is rarely appropriate. A success fee is therefore normally deducted from the estate's recovery.

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If the ICB gets it wrong

Two routes, and one dead end worth knowing about in advance.

If the ICB decides your relative wasn't eligible, you start with local resolution. If that fails, you can escalate to the Independent Review Process — but you must contact NHS England within six months of the local dispute resolution outcome letter, and return the review form within six weeks of it being issued (NHS England, July 2023). Note where that six-month clock starts: the local resolution outcome, not the original decision. The review itself typically takes three to six months.

The dead end is this. If the ICB agrees your relative was eligible but calculates the refund wrongly, the Independent Review Process can't help you — it expressly cannot consider "the calculation of any redress payment." That dispute goes through the NHS complaints procedure instead, and ultimately to the Ombudsman. Families routinely spend months in the wrong queue.

For context on how often these cases go astray — though the most recent published breakdown is now some years old — the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman made decisions on 336 Continuing Healthcare cases between April 2018 and July 2020, and of the 150 it investigated, it found failings in 55 (PHSO, 2020). Our guide to the Ombudsman as the final stage covers what that route can and can't achieve.

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The Bottom Line

An estate claim is slower and more paperwork-heavy than families expect, and the money is never guaranteed. But the law is more open than the marketing suggests, and the first step is a letter rather than a fee agreement.

• Death doesn't end the claim — an executor or administrator brings it, and the refund goes into the estate
• Standing is broader than "you need probate" — but only for some routes: an executor acts under the will, an administrator only once letters of administration are granted, and probate delay earns an extension
• No deadline applies to care from 1 April 2012 — the pressure is archival, not legal
• Evidence is the real constraint, not time — the national retention standard for adult social care records is 8 years, but request them first rather than assuming
• Use the Access to Health Records Act, not a SAR — a SAR cannot reach a deceased person's records
• The needs portrayal response is how your account reaches the panel — you're asked to reply within 28 days where possible, so treat it as the substantive step it is
• Interest is compound RPI, and legal costs are rarely refunded — a success fee reduces what beneficiaries receive

Start by scoping the period and the sum with our retrospective claim calculator, then write to the record holders. Everything else depends on what comes back.

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Sources

• DHSC, Dealing with requests for assessments of previously unassessed periods of care from 1 April 2012, updated 19 March 2025, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/continuing-healthcare-previously-unassessed-periods-of-care/dealing-with-requests-for-assessments-of-previously-unassessed-periods-of-care-from-1-april-2012
• GOV.UK, Deadline approaches for NHS continuing healthcare, 27 September 2012, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deadline-approaches-for-nhs-continuing-healthcare
• GOV.UK, Final deadline approaches for NHS continuing healthcare claims, 1 March 2013, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/final-deadline-approaches-for-nhs-continuing-healthcare-claims
• NHS England, NHS Continuing Healthcare Refreshed Redress Guidance, 1 April 2015, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/nhs-cont-hlthcr-rdress-guid-fin.pdf
• NHS England, NHS Continuing Healthcare Independent Review Process: Public Information Guide (v3), 3 July 2023, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/nhs-continuing-healthcare-independent-review-process.pdf
• NHS England, CHC and FNC Report Q3 2025/26, published 12 February 2026, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/CHC-and-FNC-Report-Q3-2025-26-TQ68n.pdf
• NHS Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, Previously Unassessed Periods of Care (PUPoC) Procedure v1, 10 April 2024, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk/media/vrkko0r3/previously-unassessed-periods-of-care-pupoc-procedure-cheshire-and-merseyside-icb-v1-2024-04-10_.pdf
• NHS North Central London ICB, Previously Unassessed Period of Care (PUPoC) Post 2012 (Adults Only), March 2024, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://nclhealthandcare.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/PUPOC-post-2012-info-for-the-web_.pdf
• NHS England, Records Management Code of Practice 2023 (v5), retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://transform.england.nhs.uk/media/documents/NHSE_Records_Management_CoP_2023.pdf
• The Private and Voluntary Health Care (England) Regulations 2001, regulation 21, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/3968/regulation/21
• Access to Health Records Act 1990, section 3, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/23/section/3
• Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Continuing Healthcare: Getting it right first time, 2020, retrieved 2026-07-20 — https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/publications/continuing-healthcare-getting-it-right-first-time

CareAdvocate provides evidence-preparation and advocacy support for NHS Continuing Healthcare. We are not solicitors, and this guide is general information, not legal or financial advice. Retrospective claims are assessed period by period and no outcome can be guaranteed. Reviewed by legal professionals and social care professionals.

Frequently asked questions

Can I claim CHC funding after my relative has died?

Yes. An executor or administrator can ask the Integrated Care Board to review a period of care that was never assessed for NHS Continuing Healthcare. NHS England's own reporting confirms these requests cover deceased as well as living cases. Any refund is paid into the estate and distributed under the will or intestacy rules.

Do I need probate to claim back care home fees?

It depends which you are. An executor's authority comes from the will, so a grant is not always the only evidence. An administrator's authority is created by the grant of letters of administration, so under intestacy you do need it. National guidance also accepts proof that you are someone with a claim arising from the death. An ICB can request that documentation within eight weeks, and should consider extending where probate is delayed.

Is there a time limit on reclaiming care home fees?

There is no submission deadline for care from 1 April 2012 onwards. Earlier periods closed under fixed deadlines on 30 September 2012 and 31 March 2013. The practical limit is evidence rather than time, so it is worth requesting the care records early.

How do I get medical records for someone who has died?

Not through a Subject Access Request — UK GDPR does not apply to the deceased. Use the Access to Health Records Act 1990, which gives the personal representative a right of access. The holder must respond within 21 days if the record is recent, or 40 days otherwise.

Will the NHS pay our solicitor's fees if we win?

Usually not. NHS England states it does not reimburse costs incurred by appointing a solicitor in the Independent Review Process, and its redress guidance notes the Ombudsman has indicated that refunding legal and professional costs is rarely appropriate. Assume a success fee comes out of the estate's recovery.