What to do when someone dies in Australia

If a death is unexpected, call 000. Police will attend, and in every Australian jurisdiction a sudden, unexplained or unnatural death is reported to the coroner rather than certified by a treating doctor. Nothing about the body can be arranged until the coroner's office releases it, and that is not a decision the family or a funeral director can accelerate.

If the death was expected — a person under palliative care at home, or with a known terminal illness — call the treating doctor or the palliative care service instead. A registered medical practitioner who has been caring for the person can complete a medical certificate of cause of death, and that document is what unlocks the entire administrative chain. In Western Australia the Registry states a doctor must complete it within 48 hours of the death and give it to the funeral director or to whoever is arranging the service.

If the person died in a hospital, a hospice or a residential aged care home, the staff will handle the immediate medical certification and will contact you about next steps. You do not need to call anyone to begin that part. What you do need to do is decide which funeral director you are using, because the funeral director is the person who collects the deceased and, in most cases, registers the death.

Find the will before you start making commitments. The will names the executor, and the executor — not the closest relative, and not whoever is paying the funeral invoice — has the legal authority to deal with the estate. It may also record funeral or burial wishes and an organ or tissue donation decision. If you cannot find a will, check with the person's solicitor, their bank's safe custody service, and the public trustee in their state.

Two things are worth doing on day one purely to protect the estate. Secure the property — an empty house with a death notice in the paper is a known target — and stop any automatic payments that will keep draining an account nobody is yet authorised to operate. Do not, however, start emptying accounts or selling possessions. Until an executor's authority is established, moving assets creates problems that are expensive to unwind.

Finally, do not sign a funeral contract in the first few hours if you can avoid it. Funeral directors are the most helpful people in the room in the first week, and they are also selling you something. The registration work they do is largely administrative, and the price of the service around it varies enormously between providers in the same suburb.

A coroner takes jurisdiction over a defined class of deaths, and the classes are statutory rather than discretionary. The Coroners Court of New South Wales lists them: a death that was violent or unnatural, including homicide, suicide and deaths related to drugs, alcohol or poison; a sudden death where the cause is unknown; a death resulting directly or indirectly from an accident or injury, even where a long interval separates the incident and the death; a death during or following a health-related procedure where the death may be causally related to that procedure and would not reasonably have been expected beforehand; and a death where no medical certificate of cause of death can be signed.

The same court lists further categories that surprise people: deaths of people in a mental health facility receiving care or treatment, deaths where the identity of the person is unknown, deaths in custody, deaths resulting from or occurring during a police operation, deaths of children in care where a report had been made about them or a sibling in the preceding three years, and deaths of people in authorised disability residential centres. Doctors, health professionals, emergency service workers and police are all under a statutory obligation to report deaths in these categories.

Once a death is reported, the coroner controls what happens to the body. The Coroners Court of New South Wales runs a Coronial Information and Support Program with publications, counselling and witness support, and coronial support staff usually make contact with the senior next of kin. A coroner may authorise a post-mortem examination, and the coronial process runs through investigation and, in some matters, an inquest before findings are delivered.

The practical consequence for the paperwork is that the cause of death is not available when the death is registered. Every jurisdiction handles this with an interim arrangement, and the wording differs. Western Australia registers the death but leaves the cause blank and calls the result an incomplete death registration, with a complete certificate available once the State Coroner finishes. The Coroners Court of Queensland issues an interim certificate — Form 29 — while testing is pending, and says the final certificate is updated once the forensic pathologist determines the cause, with the updated certificate issued free if you return the interim one.

In the Australian Capital Territory the position is stated more bluntly: Access Canberra will not issue a death certificate without a cause of death finding, and the interim certificate confirms only that the death has been registered while the cause awaits the coroner's findings. South Australia's Coroners Court, at 302 King William Street in Adelaide, publishes its findings and runs its own family support material through the coronial process.

Plan around the delay rather than fighting it. An interim or incomplete certificate is enough for many purposes — a funeral can proceed, and some institutions will act on it — but life insurers, superannuation trustees and land titles offices frequently will not finalise anything until the cause of death is settled. If an insurer or a fund refuses to progress a claim, ask them in writing to confirm exactly which document they are waiting for, because 'the death certificate' can mean two different documents at two different stages.

Registration is the step that converts a medical event into a legal record, and it is done by the state or territory registry where the death occurred — not where the person lived, and not federally. In practice the funeral director lodges it. Queensland puts the fallback plainly: if you are not using a funeral director, or they are not registering the death, you must do it yourself, and the responsibility sits with the spouse, partner, relative, friend, or the person in charge of the place where the death occurred.

The deadlines are short and they are not counted the same way. New South Wales requires registration within seven days of the burial or cremation. The Northern Territory requires it within seven working days after burial or cremation, and charges no fee for the registration itself. Queensland requires registration within 14 days and also charges nothing to register. Western Australia's Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act requires a person — usually the funeral director — to notify the Registry within 14 days from the date of the funeral service.

What the registry needs is consistent across jurisdictions even where the forms differ: the deceased's full name and any former names, date and place of death, date and place of birth, occupation, usual address, parents' details, marriage and relationship particulars, children's names and ages, the medical certificate of cause of death signed by a doctor, and the disposal details from the cemetery or crematorium. Gather that information before the funeral director asks for it — the family history questions are the ones that take longest.

Registration is free or near-free almost everywhere; the certificate is what costs money, and it is a separate application. The Northern Territory Registry states expressly that a death certificate is not issued automatically and you must apply for it, with certificates usually issued within ten business days of a complete application. Queensland processes standard certificate applications in up to ten business days and urgent applications in two, for an additional fee. New South Wales quotes three to four weeks for a standard certificate and two to three weeks for a priority certificate.

In Tasmania, funeral directors registered as a prescribed business lodge death registration details online, transferring them directly to Births, Deaths and Marriages without a paper form. The framework in each jurisdiction sits in its own Act — the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1999 in Tasmania, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1997 in the ACT, and the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1996 in the Northern Territory — and each has been amended repeatedly, so a registry's current published page beats any summary, including this one.

If the death happened overseas, the Australian registries have no record to register. The death is registered in the country where it occurred, and you will need that country's death certificate, usually translated and authenticated, before Australian institutions will act. If the person was an Australian citizen or resident, the Australian consular network is the starting point rather than any state registry.

There are two documents and people routinely confuse them. The medical certificate of cause of death is written by a doctor and is the medical record of why the person died. The death certificate is issued by the registry after the death is registered, and it is the legal proof that the death occurred. Institutions want the second one. You cannot obtain it until registration is complete, which is why the registration deadline matters more than it looks.

Several jurisdictions issue two versions of the death certificate. Victoria offers a certificate with the cause of death and one without. Queensland issues a full death certificate and a limited death certificate that omits the cause, and warns that some organisations will not accept the limited version. Tasmania's registry states that for deaths registered from 1970 onwards a standard certificate does not show the cause of death at all, and that you must apply separately for a Medical Certificate of Cause of Death if you need it. Order the version that shows the cause unless you have a specific reason not to, because a refused document costs another application and another wait.

Not everyone can apply. New South Wales limits applications to the next of kin named on the certificate — a married or de facto partner, parent or child — plus the funeral director within 30 days of registration, the executor of the estate, and a solicitor acting for the next of kin, and requires every applicant to provide proof of identity. Western Australia takes a similar approach: family members need evidence of the relationship, executors and administrators need documentation of their status, and records more than 30 years old are open to anyone aged 16 or over.

Order more certified copies than you think you need, and order them at the same time. Every organisation that holds an asset will want to see one, and many will keep it: each bank, each superannuation fund, each insurer, the land titles office, the share registry, the aged care provider refunding an accommodation deposit. A realistic starting point for an estate with a house, a couple of bank accounts and a super fund is five to ten copies. A single account with nothing else might need two.

Cost and speed vary by registry and change regularly, so treat any figure as indicative. At the time of writing the NSW Registry listed a standard certificate at $70 and a priority certificate at $105 including postage; Queensland listed certificates at $58.10 each with a package of both types at $116.20; and Western Australia listed a certified certificate at $60 with a priority fee for faster processing. Confirm the current fee with the registry before you apply.

Keep the originals and circulate scans first. Many organisations will now accept a scanned certified copy to begin a process and only require the physical document later, and some will accept a certified copy made by a justice of the peace or a pharmacist rather than an original from the registry. Ask before you post an original into a mailroom you cannot chase.

Services Australia asks to be told within 28 days where the person who died was receiving a payment, so that its records can be updated and the estate is not left owing an overpayment. You can notify by phone or by completing and returning the Advice of Death form, SA116. Do this even where you think the payments have already stopped, because a payment credited after the date of death has to be repaid, and the repayment demand lands on the estate rather than on the agency's own error.

Notifying Services Australia is also what opens the bereavement provisions. Where a partner dies, a lump sum bereavement payment may be available to help the survivor move to a single income, calculated across a bereavement period that the Department of Social Services' Social Security Guide defines as 14 weeks beginning on the day of the death. Separately, people with mutual obligation or activity test requirements can be exempted for a period after the death of an immediate family member or a partner. None of this is automatic; it follows the notification.

Medicare, Child Support and the aged care record are all held by Services Australia but are not necessarily updated by a single call, so ask specifically which of the deceased's records have been closed and which are still open. If the person was a carer, or was being cared for under a payment, the survivor's own entitlements change as well — a Carer Payment does not simply continue indefinitely after the person being cared for dies, and the transitional arrangements have their own rules.

The Australian Taxation Office needs to be told separately; Services Australia does not do it for you. The ATO publishes an online form to notify it of a death and of who will manage the estate, followed by an identity verification step at a participating Australia Post outlet within 30 days of submitting the form. Until someone is recorded as the authorised contact, nobody can find out what the deceased owed or was owed.

Becoming that authorised contact requires evidence of authority — a certified or original copy of the will, the grant of probate, or letters of administration — because the ATO will not discuss a person's tax affairs with a relative who has no legal standing. Once you are on the record, the ATO can tell you whether there are outstanding returns from prior income years, which is frequently the first anyone learns of a problem.

Two returns may be needed and they are different animals. The date of death tax return covers the period from 1 July of the income year in which the person died up to the date of death, and is required where tax was withheld from their income, their taxable income exceeded the tax-free threshold, or they had lodged returns in earlier years or had outstanding ones. Where no return is required, the ATO asks for a non-lodgment advice marked 'DECEASED' with the date of death. After that, the estate itself is a trust: its first income year starts the day after the person died and ends on the next 30 June, and a trust tax return may be needed for income the estate earns while it is being administered.

Do not forget the electoral roll, the passport and the driver licence. Service NSW's bereavement guide points to the Services Australia checklist covering Centrelink, Medicare, the ATO and the electoral roll, and separately flags closing or transferring vehicle and vessel registrations, toll accounts and licences through the state road authority. These are small tasks with a real identity-security purpose — an uncancelled licence or passport is a usable identity document — and they are the ones most often left undone.

The Australian Death Notification Service at deathnotification.gov.au is a free government service that lets you notify multiple organisations of a death through one online form instead of writing to each separately. It is referenced by Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria, the Western Australian Registry, Service NSW and Legal Aid NSW as the single-notification channel, which is unusual — it is genuinely national rather than one state's tool.

It works by validating the details you enter against the Australian Death Check, which holds death registration data recorded by the births, deaths and marriages registries across Australia. That is the reason for the hard prerequisite: the death must already be registered before the service can confirm it. If you try to use it in the first week you will simply be told the record cannot be found, and the natural conclusion — that something has gone wrong — is usually just that registration has not caught up.

Once the details validate, you select the organisations to notify and give your own contact details so they can come back to you. Participating organisations include banks, superannuation funds, insurers, utilities, telecommunications providers, government agencies and education providers. Organisations opt in, so the list is a subset of the market rather than everyone, and a response with next steps can take up to ten business days.

What the service does is start a conversation. What it does not do is close accounts, transfer ownership, cancel direct debits, release funds or pay out a claim. Each organisation will still write to you asking for a certified death certificate, proof of your authority, and its own forms. Treat the service as a way to avoid drafting twenty letters, not as a way to avoid twenty processes.

Several categories fall outside it entirely and need doing by hand. Joint accounts and joint utility accounts need the survivor's own instructions. Subscriptions, streaming services, gym memberships, storage units and online accounts have no registry connection at all. Vehicle registration, driver licences, boat and firearms licences sit with state authorities. Council rates, strata levies and land tax follow the property. And any business the person ran — an ABN, a trust, an SMSF, employees — is a separate body of work.

Keep a written log of every notification with the date, the organisation, the reference number and what they said they needed. Estate administration runs for months, correspondence arrives out of order, and the executor with a contemporaneous log is in a materially better position than the one reconstructing events from memory when a fund or an insurer asks why something was not done sooner.

Superannuation is the asset families most often get wrong, because it does not automatically form part of the estate and it is not distributed by the will unless the member specifically directed it there. ASIC's Moneysmart explains that when a person dies the fund pays their remaining super, and any insurance benefit attached to it, as a superannuation death benefit — and the money in a super account does not automatically become an estate asset.

Who receives it depends on what nomination the member made. A binding death benefit nomination obliges the trustee to pay the benefit to the nominated beneficiary unless doing so would be unlawful. A non-binding nomination is a preference the trustee will consider but is not bound by. Where there is no nomination at all, the fund decides, and Moneysmart notes plainly that the fund's decision might not match what the member would have chosen.

The nomination can only point at particular people. Superannuation law limits death benefit recipients to the member's dependants — broadly a spouse or de facto partner, children, and people in an interdependency or financial dependency relationship — or to the legal personal representative, meaning the executor or administrator. Naming the legal personal representative is how a member routes super into the estate so it is distributed under the will; without that, a will that purports to leave 'my superannuation' to someone may have no effect.

Because super sits outside the estate, a grant of probate is often unnecessary to access it. Legal Aid NSW states directly that if the deceased left money in their superannuation fund you do not need to apply for a grant. That is a useful lever for a surviving partner with an urgent cash need, and it is worth raising with the fund early rather than waiting for the estate work to conclude.

Where there is no binding nomination, the trustee makes a decision and must give the people affected a chance to respond before it is finalised. If you disagree with a proposed distribution, the objection window is short and it is set by the trustee's notice — read that letter the day it arrives, because complaint rights to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority depend on objecting within the period stated. The same applies to a declined insurance claim inside the fund.

Life insurance held outside super, and insurance inside it, behave differently again: a policy with a nominated beneficiary generally pays that person directly, while a policy owned by the deceased with no nomination usually pays into the estate. The tax outcome also differs by who receives it — death benefits paid to a tax dependant are treated differently from those paid to an adult child who is not financially dependent, and that distinction can be worth a substantial sum. Take advice before directing a benefit anywhere.

Probate is a grant from the Supreme Court confirming that a will is valid and that the executor named in it has authority to administer the estate. Letters of administration do the same job where there is no valid will, or where the will names no executor able to act — in which case a close family member usually applies. Both are grants of representation, and neither is needed in every estate.

Whether you need a grant turns on what the assets are and how they were held. The Supreme Court of Victoria puts it as a question of the value and type of assets, how the assets are held, and whether banks or other organisations require one. NSW guidance is similar: a grant is generally needed where assets were owned solely by the deceased or exceed a threshold, and generally not needed where all assets were shared with a single person or the total is below one.

Assets held as joint tenants pass to the survivor by survivorship and do not form part of the estate. Legal Aid NSW says a grant may be unnecessary where the estate consists only of jointly owned property or personal items such as furniture and clothing, and — as above — that superannuation does not require a grant. That is why many estates involving a long-married couple with a jointly owned home and a joint account never go near a court.

Each bank sets its own threshold for releasing funds without a grant, and they differ. It is worth asking each institution, in writing, what it requires for the balance actually held, because the answer is sometimes a statutory declaration and an indemnity rather than a court grant. Getting that answer before you engage a solicitor can save the estate several thousand dollars.

Where a grant is needed, the mechanics are jurisdiction-specific. In New South Wales you must publish a notice of intended application on the Supreme Court website and wait 14 days before filing, and you should apply within six months of the death — later applications need a reasonable explanation to the court. In Victoria applications are made online through RedCrest-Probate with a certified death certificate, the original will and details of assets and debts, and documents must be printed and signed in front of a qualified witness such as a justice of the peace; the Probate Office also runs an optional small estates service.

You do not have to do this alone or expensively. The NSW Trustee and Guardian administers estates and can be engaged instead of a private solicitor, and Legal Aid NSW notes that private lawyers can charge fixed scale costs for the probate work itself, with separate charges for asset searches, tax advice, valuations and property sales. Every state and territory has an equivalent public trustee, and using one is often the sensible choice for a modest estate with a complicated family.

One last warning about timing. Family provision claims — applications by a person who says they were inadequately provided for — have their own limitation periods running from death or from the grant, depending on the jurisdiction. An executor who distributes an estate quickly, before those periods expire and without following the statutory notice procedure, can end up personally exposed. Slow is usually right.