Megan is a senior researcher and writer at Which?, with a background in data analysis and stats in the public and charity sectors.
Holly covers personal finance topics from credit cards to wills. She enjoys turning complex money matters into clear, practical advice.
If ill health means you can't manage your own affairs, power of attorney allows someone else to make decisions on your behalf.
But only if it was registered while you still had mental capacity.
Yet our August survey of 1,096 Which? Connect panel members found around half hadn't registered a power of attorney.
And the average age of those who had set up one up was 68, with a substantial number leaving it to their 70s and beyond.
To help you accomplish a task you might have putting off, we turned to the people who've registered already to give their advice on how to avoid common pitfalls.
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Of those who had power of attorney in place in our survey, the average age to set up power of attorney was 68.
Just 1% had registered before the age of 50, while 11% didn't register until they reached their 80s.
People gave various reasons for putting it off. Around a quarter of those who hadn't registered said they didn't need to because they still had full mental capacity and/or weren't in ill health. But, this attitude risks leaving it too late as power of attorney can only be set up while you still have mental capacity.
The time taken to complete your power of attorney registration can be quite long, especially if you’re in Scotland
The same proportion said they had a trusted person who could help if necessary, but that person would still need power of attorney to be able to deal with organisations like banks and councils.
Once you get around to it, the time taken to complete your power of attorney registration can be quite long, especially if you’re in Scotland. The Scottish Office of the Public Guardian previously attributed the backlog to the pandemic, an outdated case management system, and a large rise in applications.
| Country | Power of attorney registration cost | Current average clearance time (days) |
|---|---|---|
| England and Wales | £92 | 44 |
| Scotland | £99* | 276 |
| Northern Ireland | £189 | 23 |
Source: Freedom of Information request from Office for the Public Guardian (England and Wales, and Scotland), Office of Care and Protection (Northern Ireland). Prices correct as of 1 September 2026.
If you don’t register a power of attorney but end up needing it, you’ll have to get a deputyship (guardianship in Scotland) through the courts, which can cost thousands of pounds and requires more documentation.
You need to pay an initial fee to set up the deputyship, potentially a court hearing fee if needed, and ongoing yearly fees to the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG). Each fee is hundreds of pounds, and these can quickly mount up into the thousands.
We spoke to one Which? member whose mother had written up an EPA (the old form of power of attorney in England and Wales) but didn’t want to register it until it was needed. Unfortunately, after she suffered a severe stroke and they needed to register it, she no longer had the mental capacity.
The member and her siblings had been made attorneys in the planned agreement and instead had to go through the Court of Protection to get deputyship. This meant involving an estranged sibling who had previously taken money from her mother and was not included in the EPA. In the end, rather than working together and thereby inviting conflict, the family appointed a solicitor as trustee.
Once you've decided to register for power of attorney, the next step is to choose who your attorney(s) will be.
The most important factor in choosing your attorney is that you trust the person, as you’ll have to leave decision-making in their hands.
If you’re married, your spouse doesn't automatically have power of attorney, so you would need to name them in the document.
You can select multiple attorneys, for example if you have more than one child and want to share the responsibility between them or between a spouse and children.
Be careful about selecting more than one attorney to act ‘jointly’ rather than ‘jointly and severally’. Acting jointly means all attorneys have to attend every appointment together and one can’t act without the other. It also means if any of the joint attorneys die, it will render the whole document invalid.
Similarly, if one attorney wanted or needed to resign from their role, the document could no longer be used. To get around this problem, it’s important to select a replacement.
A replacement attorney is someone who would step in to take over responsibilities, and you can name them if you have one or several attorneys. In cases involving joint attorneys, you have the option to appoint each one individually as a replacement where needed.
If you’ve got two people with equal powers and there’s a disgruntlement between them, you can’t resolve it easily
Splitting the burden can be a relief when the attorneys work well together. But other times, picking two attorneys – even jointly and severally – can lead to clashes, especially where the two chosen don’t trust each other.
We spoke to one member who's working alongside his brother as an attorney. Unfortunately, the pair have struggled to work together and his brother has reported him twice to the Office of the Public Guardian.
He said: ‘If you’ve got two people with equal powers and there’s a disgruntlement between them, you can’t resolve it easily. The family relationships have collapsed. We were on reasonable terms before, but now it’s just complete hatred and mistrust.’
It can be difficult to find someone to be your attorney if you don’t have a partner or children and your friends are a similar age to you.
If there’s no one suitable, you’ll need to find a professional you trust, most likely a solicitor. This will, unfortunately, cost you several hundred pounds per hour of their time.
You can name a specific solicitor or an entire firm if it's listed as a 'trust corporation'. Opting for a single solicitor could be a problem if they retire or leave the profession, while using a trust corporation might mean less consistency on who handles your affairs.
When considering solicitors, you could ask how many times they have been an attorney to get a sense of their experience and quality of supervision. That would also be a good time to ask about how much they would charge per hour of work.
The process for registering a power of attorney is long and involves many steps you have to follow in a precise order.
The forms are first filled in by the donor (the person on whose behalf decisions will be made), their witness, the certificate provider (an impartial person who confirms the donor has the mental capacity to sign the document), then the attorneys (the person acting on behalf of the donor) and their witness.
Any small mistakes in your forms will result in your application being rejected and sent back. According to a Freedom of Information request by investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, the OPG rejected 48,945 lasting power of attorney applications in 2024/25 – 4% of all applications.
I held an afternoon tea at my house to get all the signatures on the same day so they can’t be in the wrong order – and was an excuse for a social event!
Richard from Winchester, for example, had his application rejected because one of his signatories put a date that was one day out and had to repeat the whole process, paying another fee.
Good communication can help avoid such hiccups. Jane from Reading said: ‘I held an afternoon tea at my house to get all the signatures on the same day so they can’t be in the wrong order – and was an excuse for a social event!’
Ensure you’re using black or blue pen and clear handwriting to prevent other frustrating rejections.
Many members wrote to us to also encourage people to use the government’s guidance for power of attorney forms, and recommended doing the forms yourself to save on solicitors’ fees. The online guide is a hefty 66 pages but tells you all you need to know in simple language.
Even if you want to pay a solicitor or will-writing service for peace of mind, it's still worth reading the guidance to get an understanding of how the process works and what questions you might want to ask.
This article uses insights from the Which? Connect panel, collected from research activities with our members. Find out how to get involved
