Can a family arrange a repatriation themselves?

Yes, in part, and the honest version of this answer is a list. Nothing in UK law says a family must use a repatriation company, and some of the work is genuinely paperwork a competent person can do. Some of it is not, either because the law or the carrier requires a funeral director, or because it is done once and the order of doing it is the whole skill. This guide is that list.

What a family can do itself

Register the death. You do this anyway, whoever is arranging the repatriation. How to register a death is the guide for the appointment itself.

Send the coroner’s notice. The form of notice to a coroner of intention to remove a body out of England and Wales is a document a family member can complete and send. It is a written notice, and the coroner’s office will tell you how to send it. The four clear days run from when the coroner receives it.

Obtain the apostille. The Foreign Office’s legalisation office will legalise an original or certified death certificate for anyone who sends it by post, for a published fee; its faster services are for registered businesses only. You can also commission a sworn translation yourself, after the apostille and not before.

Deal with the consulate. Most consulates will deal with a family member directly, and some prefer it. What they want, and on which days, is on their website in most cases and in a phone call in the rest.

Those four are real, and a family that does them carefully has done a meaningful share of the work.

What a family cannot do itself

The care, the embalming and the coffin. Your loved one has to be collected from the hospital or home, cared for somewhere suitable, embalmed by someone trained to do it, and placed in a coffin sealed to the standard the destination and the carrier require. Hospitals normally release only to a funeral director; embalming is a trade skill with its own professional body; and the embalming and coffin certificates that the border and the airline will ask for are issued by the funeral director who did the work. There is no version of this a family does.

The transport. No airline accepts a coffin without the embalming and coffin certificates a funeral director issues, and in practice cargo agents deal with funeral directors and registered shippers, not with private individuals. A family cannot drive a coffin across Europe in a private vehicle either, because the transit countries and the destination require a vehicle and a carrier that meet their rules. By road or by air explains what the transport actually involves.

The handover at the other end. A funeral director at the destination collects from the airport’s cargo terminal or receives the vehicle, and completes the local registration. This is a firm in that country, and it is needed whoever did the UK end.

What a family could do but should not

The documents in the right order. Everything in the first list depends on the thing before it: the coroner’s acknowledgement is needed before the carrier will book; the apostille goes on before the translation; the consulate wants the apostilled, translated certificate before it will issue its authorisation; the booking waits for the consulate. Done in the wrong order, a document is done twice, and the timetable slips by the time it takes. A specialist does this list every week and knows which consulate receives on which morning. A family does it once, under grief, and what documents does a repatriation need is the map, but a map is not the same as having driven the road.

What it would save

The four tasks in the first list are a small part of a repatriation’s cost. Most of the figure is the care, the coffin, the embalming and the transport, which a family cannot do, and the receiving funeral director’s charges, which are separate anyway. Doing the paperwork yourself and paying a funeral director for the rest saves a few hundred pounds on a figure in the thousands, and it does not shorten the timetable by a day, because the waiting periods belong to the coroner, the consulate and the carrier whoever is asking. How much does repatriation cost from the UK has the bands.

A fair way to do it

Ask for a quote for the split: you do the registration, the coroner’s notice, the apostille and the consulate; the company does the care, the coffin, the transport and the handover. We will quote for exactly that, and the difference between it and the full figure is the honest answer to what doing it yourself is worth. Some families take it, and some, on seeing the number, decide that the four tasks are not where they want to spend the week after a death.

Repatriation, step by step is the full list of tasks the split above is drawn from.