Practical steps · 9 min read

What to do when someone dies

The practical order of the first few days — who to call, how the medical examiner process works, registering the death within five days, and what genuinely can wait.

Published 2026-07-28

Last reviewed 2026-08-04

When someone dies, the number of things that suddenly need doing can feel overwhelming — especially when you are grieving and people are telling you different things. The good news is that very little of it is urgent in the first few hours, and the parts that are legally required follow a fixed order. This guide walks through that order as it actually works in the London Borough of Bexley.

Step 1: Getting the death verified

Before anything else can happen, a medical professional has to formally verify that the person has died. What that involves depends on where the death happened.

• In hospital, a hospice or a care home: the staff handle verification and will contact you. They will also explain how and when to collect the person's belongings, and where the person will be cared for until the funeral director collects them.
• At home, expected: call the GP surgery in working hours, or NHS 111 out of hours. A doctor or a suitably trained nurse will attend to verify the death.
• At home, sudden or unexpected: call 999. The death will normally be referred to the coroner — this is routine and does not imply anything is wrong.

You do not have to call a funeral director immediately, and you should never feel rushed into it. If the death happened at home, however, the funeral director will usually be the one who brings the person into their care, so many families do make that call within the first day.

Step 2: The medical examiner and the MCCD

This is the part that most guides written before 2024 get wrong, and it is the stage that causes the most confusion for families today.

Since 9 September 2024, England and Wales have operated a statutory medical examiner system. It is the biggest change to death certification in over 50 years. In practice it means that every death which is not being investigated by a coroner is now independently reviewed by a medical examiner — a senior doctor who is separate from the team that treated the person — before the death can be registered.

The medical examiner will review the medical records, agree the cause of death, and complete the Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCD). Crucially, the medical examiner's office will normally telephone you as the next of kin to explain the proposed cause of death and to give you the chance to ask questions or raise any concerns about the care the person received. That call is a genuine opportunity — if something about the care worries you, this is the right moment to say so.

If a coroner is involved, the process is different again. The coroner may authorise the death to be registered, order a post-mortem, or open an inquest. Where there is an inquest, the coroner issues an interim certificate of the fact of death, which banks and most organisations will accept while matters are resolved. Coroner cases take longer, and that is normal.

Step 3: Registering the death in Bexley

In England and Wales a death must be registered within five days, unless a coroner is investigating or the register office has agreed an extension. The five days run from the point the medical examiner's office confirms the cause of death, not from the moment of death itself — so do not panic if the medical examiner stage has already taken longer than that.

A death must be registered in the district where it happened. If the person died anywhere in the London Borough of Bexley, that means the Bexley Register Office:

If the person died outside Bexley but you live here, you can attend any register office and make a 'declaration' — the paperwork is then forwarded to the district where the death occurred. This adds a few days, so if you can reasonably get to the correct office it is usually quicker.

Who can register a death

Registration is normally done by a relative. If no relative is available, it can be done by someone present at the death, an official from the hospital, or the person arranging the funeral. You cannot send a friend in your place simply for convenience.

What to take with you

• The person's full name, including any maiden or previous names, and their date and place of birth
• Their last address and their occupation
• The full name, date of birth and occupation of a surviving spouse or civil partner
• Whether they were receiving a State Pension or any other benefits
• Their NHS number if you have it, plus their birth certificate, marriage or civil partnership certificate and passport if you can find them — helpful, but not compulsory
• Your own ID

What you get at the end

You will leave the registration appointment with two things that matter:

1. The certificate for burial or cremation — often called the 'green form'. Your funeral director needs this before the funeral can go ahead. It is free.
2. Death certificates — certified copies you will need for banks, pensions, insurers and probate. These are charged per copy. Order several at once: getting extra copies later costs more and takes longer, and organisations frequently want to see an original rather than a photocopy. Most families find four or five is about right.

Step 4: Tell Us Once

When you register the death, the registrar will offer you the Tell Us Once service. Use it. It is genuinely one of the few pieces of government administration that saves real time.

Tell Us Once notifies most government departments and council services in a single step, including HMRC, the DWP (State Pension and benefits), the DVLA, the Passport Office, and Bexley Council for council tax, Blue Badges, and electoral registration. Instead of repeating the same painful conversation a dozen times, you have it once.

Step 5: Appointing a funeral director

You can appoint a funeral director at any point — some families do it within hours, others wait until after registration. There is no legal requirement to use a funeral director at all, although the overwhelming majority of families do.

Two things are worth knowing before you make that call, because they save both money and stress:

• You are not obliged to use the first firm you speak to, or the one the hospital or care home mentions. Nor do you have to use the nearest. It is entirely reasonable to ring three firms and compare.
• Every UK funeral director must publish a Standardised Price List under the CMA's Funerals Market Investigation Order 2021. You are legally entitled to see it, prominently, before committing to anything. If a firm is evasive about price, that tells you something.

For context, the SunLife Cost of Dying Report 2026 puts the average simple attended funeral in the UK at £3,828 — but at around £4,897 in London, meaningfully above the national figure. A direct cremation averages £1,628. Prices between firms covering the same few streets in Bexley can differ by well over a thousand pounds for a broadly similar service, which is exactly why comparing is worth the twenty minutes.

What can wait

Plenty. In the first few days, the only things that genuinely need attention are verification, the medical examiner process, registration, and — if the death was at home — arranging for the person to be taken into a funeral director's care. Everything below can wait a week or more without consequence:

• Probate and dealing with the estate — this typically takes months, and starting on day three changes nothing
• Closing social media accounts and email
• Cancelling subscriptions, magazines and memberships
• Clearing the house — resist any pressure to rush this
• Deciding on a headstone or memorial, which usually cannot be installed for several months anyway while the ground settles

A note on grief and pace

Administration has a way of crowding out grief, and there is a temptation to keep busy because the list is there. But almost nothing on that list is improved by being done on the first day rather than the fifth. Let people help with specific, bounded tasks — collecting certificates, ringing three funeral directors for prices, sitting with you at the register office — rather than asking generally whether they can do anything.

If you want support beyond the practical, Cruse Bereavement Support runs a free national helpline, and your GP can refer you locally. You do not have to wait until you are struggling badly to ask.