What to do when someone dies: a checklist for the first 48 hours, the first month, and after

The short answer: in the first 48 hours you need a legal pronouncement of death, a decision about the body, and care arranged for anyone who depended on the person, including pets. Almost everything else on this page can wait days or weeks. If you are reading this hours after a death, the first section is the only one you need today.

A note on what this page is. It describes what usually happens and in roughly what order. It is not legal advice, and it cannot be, because probate, deadlines, and the rules for small estates vary by state and sometimes by county. Where something varies, this page says so rather than guessing on your behalf.

The first 48 hours

Five things belong in this window. Everything else can move.

1. Get the legal pronouncement. In a hospital or care facility the staff do this. At home, call 911, or call the hospice line first if hospice was involved and the death was expected. The pronouncement is what eventually produces the death certificate, and nearly every step below depends on having one.
2. Decide about organ and tissue donation. This one is genuinely time limited. If the person registered as a donor, the hospital usually raises it. If you are not sure, ask.
3. Arrange transport of the body. A funeral home or cremation provider handles this. You do not have to have chosen a service, a casket, or a date to make this call. Transport and arrangements are separate decisions, and funeral homes are used to being called before anything is settled.
4. Make sure dependents and pets are covered. Children, an aging spouse, anyone who was being cared for, and animals in the house. This is the item most often forgotten in the first day.
5. Secure the home. Lock up, and if the house is now empty, think about mail, perishables, medications, and who has keys.

Tell close family and, if the person was working, the employer. Beyond that, calls can wait. You are allowed to not answer the phone.

The first two weeks

This is the notification stretch, and it starts with one purchase: certified copies of the death certificate. Order between five and ten. Most institutions keep the copy you send rather than returning it, so in practice one copy closes one account. The funeral home can usually order them with everything else.

Keep a running log from the first call: who you contacted, on what date, what they asked for, and what they said. Executors who skip this spend weeks later reconstructing it. One person on Reddit described losing a weekend rebuilding a year of activity from a shoebox of receipts, and noted that most estate disputes they had seen were not about theft, just about an executor who could not show where the money went.

What you will need before you can do most of this

Every list above assumes you know which accounts exist. That assumption is where most of the real work hides. You cannot notify a bank you do not know about, and nobody hands an executor a master list.

Paper used to solve this. Statements arrived, bills arrived, and a shoebox of mail was a rough map of someone’s financial life. Paperless billing, autopay, and app-only accounts have quietly removed that map. An account that bills silently to a card, sends nothing to the house, and lives behind a phone passcode is invisible to the person now responsible for closing it.

Practical places to look: the last two years of tax returns, which name employers, banks paying interest, and brokerages. Whatever mail still arrives, for a full year, because annual statements and policy renewals surface things monthly mail does not. The card and bank statements you can reach, read line by line for recurring charges. And the person’s email, if you have lawful access to it, searched for words like statement, invoice, renewal, and policy.

Two more places worth checking, both easy to overlook. A safe deposit box, which may be listed nowhere except an annual fee on a bank statement, and which usually needs proof of your authority before the bank will open it. And a password manager, if the person used one, because it doubles as an index of the accounts that exist even when you cannot get into them. Many services also have a legacy or inactive-account setting that only helps if it was switched on in advance, which is worth knowing now rather than assuming.

Expect this to be the slowest part, and expect it to keep producing surprises for months. An account nobody finds does not disappear. After a dormancy period it is generally turned over to the state as unclaimed property, where it waits for someone to think to search for it. Every state runs a free search, and it is worth repeating that search a year on.

If you are reading this while thinking about your own family rather than handling a death today, that is the problem worth solving in advance. Our guide to building a death binder covers what to record and where, and what happens to your accounts when you die covers the digital side in more depth.

Why accounts lock before you are ready

Notification and access work against each other. Once an institution learns of a death, accounts in the person’s sole name are generally frozen until someone proves legal authority to act. That is the system working as designed, and it still catches most families by surprise.

The order matters more than people expect. Bills do not pause because an account is frozen. A mortgage, a utility, an insurance premium, and a car payment keep coming due while the money that would pay them sits behind a process. Families often discover this in week three, when the freeze and the first billing cycle meet.

Joint accounts and accounts with a named beneficiary usually behave differently, and often pass more directly, but the details depend on how the account was titled and on state law. If cash flow is going to be tight during this period, that is a specific question worth taking to an estate attorney early rather than discovering later.

One practical consequence: think before you notify everyone on the same afternoon. Notification is necessary and you should not delay it to keep spending, which creates its own problems. But knowing which bills fall due in the next few weeks, and telling whoever is handling the estate before the freeze lands, tends to make the difference between an inconvenience and a scramble. Ask each institution what they need from you to keep essential payments moving. Many have a process for it, and almost none volunteer it.

The first six months

This is the long administrative tail, and its pace is set by institutions rather than by you.

• Probate, if it applies. Not every estate goes through it. Many states have a simplified process for smaller estates, and assets with a living beneficiary or a surviving joint owner often pass outside it entirely. Whether it applies to you, and by when, is a state-specific question.
• Retitling. Vehicles, property, and accounts that need a new name on them. Each has its own office and its own form.
• Tax filings. A final personal return is usually required, and depending on the estate there may be others. Deadlines here are real and are worth asking a tax professional about rather than reading off a webpage.
• Recurring charges. Subscriptions, memberships, streaming, storage units, and anything else on autopay. This is where the discovery work above pays off, because you can only cancel what you found. Our guide to subscriptions after death walks the discovery path and covers what each provider will ask you for.
• Credit bureaus. Notifying the three bureaus helps prevent identity theft, which does happen after a death.

What can wait, and what people wrongly rush

Almost everything below the first two sections can wait longer than it feels like it can. A few things are commonly rushed at real cost.

• Do not rush giving away or selling belongings. Once items leave, they cannot be counted, valued, or divided fairly, and this is a common source of family conflict months later.
• Do not close the primary bank account early. Refunds, final paychecks, and reimbursements often arrive weeks later and need somewhere to land.
• Do not rush closing email or a phone number. Both are how you discover the accounts you have not found yet. Keeping the phone line active for a while is often more useful than anything else on this list.
• Do not sign anything you do not understand because someone is waiting on it. Waiting a week to ask a professional is nearly always available to you.

Grief and administration do not run on the same clock. The list will still be there next week.