What happens if you die without a will

If you die without a valid will, your estate is not left to sort itself out. It is distributed according to a fixed set of rules called intestacy, set out in law and applied in the same order regardless of what you might have wanted, who you were close to, or who depended on you. Understanding those rules is the fastest way to see whether they would produce a result you are comfortable with — and, for a lot of families, they do not.

The order the rules apply in

Intestacy asks one question first: does the person who died leave a spouse or civil partner? Everything else follows from the answer.

• Spouse or civil partner, and children. The spouse or civil partner takes the deceased’s personal possessions, the first £322,000 of the estate (the statutory legacy), and half of whatever is left. The other half is divided equally between the children. If a child has already died leaving children of their own, that share passes to the grandchildren in their place.
• Spouse or civil partner, no children. The spouse or civil partner inherits the whole estate. Parents, siblings and anyone else are further down the order and only inherit if there is no surviving spouse or civil partner at all.
• No spouse, civil partner or children. The estate passes to the closest surviving relatives in a set order — parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives — each rank inheriting only if nobody in the rank above survived.

Two points in that order catch people out more than any other.

An unmarried partner inherits nothing under intestacy, however long the relationship lasted. Living together for decades, owning a home jointly, or raising children together makes no difference to the intestacy rules themselves — a partner who was never married to, or in a civil partnership with, the person who died has no automatic entitlement to any part of the estate. Property held as joint tenants usually passes to the survivor outside the estate regardless, but everything else the deceased owned in their own name goes to blood relatives under the rules above, not to the partner.

Stepchildren who were never legally adopted do not inherit under intestacy, even where the person who died raised them from infancy and thought of them as their own. Intestacy follows legal and blood relationships, not the relationships a family actually lived. A stepparent who wants a stepchild to inherit has to say so in a will; there is no other route.

What an administrator has to do

Someone still has to deal with the estate when there is no will — collect in the assets, pay any debts, and distribute what is left. Without a will there is no executor named to do that job, so the person entitled to act under the intestacy rules applies instead for a grant called letters of administration, and is known as an administrator rather than an executor.

The day-to-day work is largely the same either way, but an administrator carries some extra weight an executor does not. An executor takes their authority from the will itself, from the moment of death; an administrator has no authority to act on the estate’s behalf until the grant is issued, which can leave urgent matters — a property standing empty, a business needing a decision — without anyone formally empowered to act on them in the meantime. An administrator must also distribute strictly according to the intestacy rules, with no discretion to depart from them even where the family agrees a different outcome would be fairer; any variation has to be done separately, in writing, with the agreement of everyone who would otherwise benefit. And where more than one person is equally entitled to apply — several siblings, say — they generally have to act together, which can slow things down if they are not in easy agreement.

None of this is a reason to panic if you are facing it. It is a reason to find out early where you stand, because the intestacy rules decide the outcome whether or not anyone involved thinks it is fair.

The only way round it

A will is the only way to change any of this. It is the only way to provide for an unmarried partner, the only way to provide for a stepchild who was never adopted, the only way to leave more to one child than another, and the only way to leave anything at all to a friend, a wider family member, or a charity. Without one, the rules above apply exactly as written, regardless of what anyone says the person who died would have wanted.

This article is general information about the law of England and Wales, not advice on your own circumstances.