This work focuses on the development of a posteriori error estimates for fourth-order, elliptic, partial differential equations. In particular, we propose a novel algorithm to steer an adaptive simulation in the context of Kirchhoff plates and Kirchhoff–Love shells by exploiting the local refinement capabilities of hierarchical B-splines. The method is based on the solution of an auxiliary residual-like variational problem, formulated by means of a space of localized spline functions. This space is characterized by c1 continuous B-splines with compact support on each active element of the hierarchical mesh. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed estimator to Kirchhoff plates and Kirchhoff–Love shells by studying several benchmark problems which exhibit both smooth and singular solutions. In all cases, we obtain optimal asymptotic rates of convergence for the error measured in the energy norm and an excellent approximation of the true error.