Name change guide
A guide to changing your name because it's an administrative hassle and I wish I had some shortcuts
Changing your name
Introduction
Hello, my name is Laura. I am a software engineer living in London, and I’ve recently changed my name legally. It was not super easy. So not easy that I thought I would document the processes I went through with different organisations to help others.
Overall it did go well. But there were one or two gotchas that caught me out and I’ve had to redo forms, re-upload documents, or rearrange appointments. Hopefully, if you read through these, you’ll get a better idea of what to do and make your plan.
As always, your mileage may vary! Use the information to form your own plan. This is just my own experience, and the order I followed was not the most efficient in hindsight.
Ordering
The order of steps is sometimes mandatory by requirements, sometimes just what you’re comfortable doing!
However, if I were to redo it I would follow instead this order:
Some light reasoning for this:
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I told work about my name change long before I had a deed poll signed. And they updated my name everywhere, they were crazy supportive. But when I did catch up legally, I had a deed poll to submit, then a new passport, and later new HMRC information. I wish I did this is in one go.
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The driving licence would have been so much easier if I had a passport already and just gave them the passport number. And the passport didn’t take that long to arrive once I figured out the application form. I wish I waited and didn’t parallelise those two tasks.
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The DVLA has so far taken the longest amount of time to process. And is also the most useful form of ID. I wish I could have done that first, but really it doesn’t matter, it took so long that I simply couldn’t wait. I’m happy for both cases where I’d leave that quite late.