OrbTop

UK Gazette Probate Notices - London/Edinburgh/Belfast

REAL ESTATELEAD GENERATIONBUSINESS
Try on Apify

UK Gazette Probate Notices Scraper — London / Edinburgh / Belfast

Scrape statutory probate notices from The Gazette — the UK's official Crown publication of record for estate notices. Covers The London Gazette, The Edinburgh Gazette, and The Belfast Gazette across an 870K+ historical corpus and approximately 150K new notices per year. Returns decedent name, last address, date of death, occupation, executor, filing solicitor, and the statutory creditor-claim expiry date. Open Government Licence; no auth, no captcha, no rate-walling beyond the publisher's 10-second Crawl-delay directive (which this actor honours by default).

UK Gazette Probate Notices Scraper Features

  • All three editions in one feed — London, Edinburgh, Belfast — or filter to one
  • Native filter on claim-expiry-date for heir-finder workflows targeting imminent statutory deadlines
  • Date-range filter on publication date for daily, weekly, or monthly incremental polls
  • UK postcode prefix filter for regional intake (SW1, EH1, BT1, …)
  • Free-text keyword search across the notice corpus
  • Pulls full RDFa-decorated detail pages — decedent middle names, occupation, exact date of death — not just the sparse listing payload
  • Honours robots.txt Crawl-delay: 10 automatically (single-thread, 10-second courtesy delay)

Who Uses UK Probate Notice Data?

  • Probate research firms — Anglia Research, Title Research, Fraser & Fraser, and other heir-finders feed daily notice flows into their case-acquisition pipelines
  • Dormant-account specialists — Track deceased estates for unclaimed-asset reconciliation against bank, pension, and Treasury Solicitor's bona vacantia records
  • Estate solicitors — Monitor section 27 Trustee Act notices to advise creditor clients before claim windows close
  • Banks and pension administrators — Trigger account-closure workflows from the official deceased-account feed
  • Genealogists — Source verified date-of-death and last-address records for family-tree research
  • PropTech and proptech-adjacent funds — Build deceased-estate scoring models for direct-mail outreach

How UK Gazette Probate Notices Scraper Works

  1. Builds one query per selected edition. With three editions selected and a 7-day window, the actor walks wills-and-probate/london/notice/data.json, then Edinburgh, then Belfast, in sequence.
  2. Pages through the JSON listing API at 100 records per page. The listing payload carries the decedent's title, last address, claim-deadline date, and the canonical notice URL.
  3. For each listing entry, fetches the per-notice HTML detail page at /notice/<id>. The detail page is RDFa-decorated, so the actor reads stable property names (personal-legal:dateOfDeath, vcard:adr, foaf:familyName, gaz:Edition) rather than visible labels — the parser does not break when The Gazette tweaks copy.
  4. Merges the listing partial with the detail-derived fields into one unified record per notice. Default Trustee Act 1925 section 27 notice text is preserved verbatim for downstream NLP.

The actor only touches robots.txt-allowed paths. The richer /data.jsonld, /data.rdf, /data.ttl, and ?view=linked-data endpoints are explicitly disallowed in the publisher's robots policy and are deliberately avoided.

Input

{
    "editions": ["london"],
    "publishedSinceDays": 7,
    "claimExpiryWithinDays": 0,
    "maxItems": 5,
    "sp_intended_usage": "Heir-finder lead generation",
    "sp_improvement_suggestions": ""
}
Field Type Default Description
editions array ["london","edinburgh","belfast"] Subset of the three Gazette editions. Empty or omitted = all three.
publishedSinceDays integer 7 Pull notices published within the last N days. 0 disables the publish-date filter.
claimExpiryWithinDays integer 0 Pull notices whose creditor-claim deadline falls within the next N days. 0 disables. Use 30, 60, or 90 for heir-finder priority intake.
datePublishedFrom string "" ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD). Overrides publishedSinceDays with an explicit start date.
datePublishedTo string "" ISO end date. Empty = today.
postcode string "" UK postcode prefix (SW1, EH1, BT1). Filters notices by location of the deceased's last address.
keyword string "" Free-text search across the notice corpus (decedent name, occupation, etc.).
maxItems integer 5 Hard cap on records returned per run. Each item triggers one detail-page fetch with a 10-second courtesy delay. Set higher (50–500) for production batches.
proxyConfiguration object Apify Proxy GB Residential The publisher does not block direct fetches, but a UK residential proxy keeps the source IP stable for production cadence.

Heir-finder example — claim deadline within 60 days

{
    "editions": ["london", "edinburgh", "belfast"],
    "publishedSinceDays": 0,
    "claimExpiryWithinDays": 60,
    "maxItems": 200,
    "sp_intended_usage": "Heir finder retainer pipeline"
}

Edinburgh-only weekly incremental

{
    "editions": ["edinburgh"],
    "publishedSinceDays": 7,
    "maxItems": 100,
    "sp_intended_usage": "Scottish probate weekly digest"
}

Postcode-targeted intake — Greater London

{
    "editions": ["london"],
    "postcode": "SW1",
    "publishedSinceDays": 30,
    "maxItems": 50,
    "sp_intended_usage": "Central London estate solicitor outreach"
}

UK Gazette Probate Notices Scraper Output Fields

{
    "notice_id": "5124340",
    "notice_url": "https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/5124340",
    "edition": "London",
    "publish_date": "2026-05-01",
    "claim_expiry_date": "2026-07-07",
    "notice_type": "Deceased Estates",
    "decedent_name": "Ernest William Gilburt",
    "decedent_aka": [],
    "decedent_address": "14 Park Crescent, Enfield, EN2 6HS",
    "decedent_dob": null,
    "decedent_dod": "2025-02-27",
    "decedent_occupation": "Printer (Retired)",
    "executor_name": "Paul Antoniou",
    "executor_address": null,
    "executor_solicitor": "Taylor Rose Solicitors",
    "solicitor_address": "4th Floor 69 Carter Lane, London, EC4V 5EQ",
    "estate_value_indicator": null,
    "notice_text": "Notice is hereby given pursuant to section 27 (Deceased Estates) of the Trustee Act 1925, …",
    "scraped_at": "2026-05-01T02:39:44.637Z"
}
Field Description
notice_id Numeric Gazette notice identifier.
notice_url Canonical URL on thegazette.co.uk.
edition London, Edinburgh, or Belfast.
publish_date Date the notice was published (YYYY-MM-DD).
claim_expiry_date Statutory creditor-claim deadline (YYYY-MM-DD). The single most important field for heir-finder workflows.
notice_type Notice category as published by The Gazette (Deceased Estates, etc.).
decedent_name Decedent's full legal name — firstName middleName(s) familyName reassembled from the RDFa fields.
decedent_aka Alternative names or maiden names if listed.
decedent_address Last known address of the deceased.
decedent_dob Date of birth if listed. Rare in section 27 notices.
decedent_dod Date of death (YYYY-MM-DD), pulled from the personal-legal:dateOfDeath RDFa property.
decedent_occupation Decedent's occupation if listed.
executor_name Executor / personal representative contact name (often the named individual at the filing firm).
executor_address Executor mailing address when separate from the solicitor.
executor_solicitor Filing solicitor / firm name.
solicitor_address Solicitor firm address. Primary direct-mail field for B2B outreach.
estate_value_indicator Estate value if mentioned in the notice text (e.g. £-prefixed amount).
notice_text Full statutory legal-information text when published inline (London edition typically; Edinburgh edition often omits inline legal text).
scraped_at Timestamp of the scrape (ISO 8601).

FAQ

How many notices does The Gazette publish?

The wills-and-probate corpus stood at 870,306 notices when this actor was verified live (2026-04-30), growing by roughly 150,000 per year. London publishes the bulk; Edinburgh adds about 18,000; Belfast adds the remainder.

Does this actor respect The Gazette's robots policy?

Yes. robots.txt sets Crawl-delay: 10 and disallows the alternative /data.jsonld, /data.rdf, /data.ttl, /data.xml, and ?view=linked-data endpoints. This actor enforces the 10-second crawl delay globally (across both listing and detail fetches) and only touches the explicitly-allowed /wills-and-probate/notice/data.json listing endpoint and the canonical /notice/<id> detail page. The data is published under the Open Government Licence.

Why is notice_text sometimes null?

The London Gazette template includes the statutory section 27 Trustee Act text inline on every deceased-estates notice. The Edinburgh and Belfast templates often omit the inline legal text — the structured fields (decedent, executor, solicitor, dates) are still populated from the RDFa-decorated detail page.

How do I run a daily incremental?

Set publishedSinceDays: 1 and schedule the actor for a daily run. Each run will pick up notices published in the last 24 hours across the editions you select. With three editions and an average of ~410 new notices per weekday, expect 200–500 records per daily incremental.

How do I target imminent claim deadlines?

Set claimExpiryWithinDays to 30, 60, or 90 and publishedSinceDays to 0. The actor will pull notices whose statutory creditor-claim window closes within the configured horizon — the priority slice for heir-finder firms.

What's the difference between executor_name and executor_solicitor?

The Gazette publishes a combined string in the Details of the Executor/Administrator block: "Firm Name, Address. (Contact Name)". This actor splits that into executor_solicitor (the firm), solicitor_address (the firm's address), and executor_name (the contact named in parentheses, falling back to the firm name when no individual contact is published).

Why does the run take 50+ seconds for just 5 records?

The actor honours robots.txt's Crawl-delay: 10 directive — every listing page and every detail fetch waits at least 10 seconds before the next request. A 5-record run is one listing fetch plus five detail fetches, gated to roughly 50 seconds. Scale maxItems linearly: 50 records ≈ 8 minutes, 500 records ≈ 80 minutes. For larger batches, set the actor's run timeout accordingly.

Can I use the Atom XML feed instead?

The Atom alternative at /wills-and-probate/notice/data.feed is a peer endpoint to the JSON one this actor uses. Both expose the same listing payload. We use JSON for parser simplicity, but neither is more or less complete.

Need More Features?

Open an issue or contact the maintainer through the Apify store. Ideas welcome — particularly around heir-finder enrichment workflows (postcode-radius search, executor-firm dedup, probate-grant cross-reference).

Try on Apify