Do it online
Apply for an Inheritance Tax reference
If you are not paying any Inheritance Tax on an estate, you should not apply for an IHT reference before you send in the IHT200. This includes cases where there is no tax to pay because you are claiming a transfer of unused nil rate band. You should just send the form and papers in and a reference will be allocated when we receive them.
If you are paying Inheritance Tax on an estate, you will need to apply for an IHT reference BEFORE you send us your form IHT200 or pay any tax.
You may need to pay Inheritance Tax at the same time or before you deliver the form to us. All payments of tax are dealt with by our payment centre, not by the Inheritance Tax offices so you will need to send your cheque to a different office to the one where you send the form IHT200.
Your reference will be unique to this estate and you should use it in all correspondence to us and for all payments of tax. It is important that you quote it whenever you contact us about Inheritance Tax.
To apply for an IHT reference you should use the online form by using the link below. You will be asked to provide information regarding the deceased and yourself. You should make sure that the information you provide matches the information you put on the form IHT200 and that you put the reference on the form IHT200 when you send it to us. Please note that you will not be able to use the online form if the deceased did not have a National Insurance number. (This may be because the deceased did not live in the UK or was a minor) If the deceased did not have a National Insurance number, please apply for a reference using form D21 (PDF 40KB) instead.
When we receive your reference request we will send you, by post, a note of your reference number and a pre-referenced payslip which you should use to pay the tax. The payslip can be used only for payments regarding this estate. If you do not use this payslip, we may not be able to credit your payment to the correct IHT account.
