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Most people who die without a will did not decide against making one. They meant to get round to it. It sat on the list somewhere below the boiler service and above sorting out the loft, and then time ran out. The result is the same either way: a set of rules written in 1925 decides who gets what, and those rules have no idea who your family actually are.
Dying without a valid will is called dying intestate, and in England and Wales the distribution of your estate then follows a fixed order set out in the Administration of Estates Act. It is not chaos. It is simply someone else's plan.
What the rules actually say
If you are married or in a civil partnership and have no children, your spouse inherits everything. If you have children as well, it splits. Your spouse takes all your personal possessions plus a fixed sum known as the statutory legacy, currently £322,000, and then half of whatever is left. The other half is shared equally between your children. If a child has died before you, their share passes down to their own children.
With no surviving spouse, the estate goes to your children in equal shares. With neither, it works down a strict order of priority: parents, then siblings, then half-siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. If nobody qualifies anywhere on that list, the estate passes to the Crown. There is also a survivorship rule: a spouse generally has to outlive you by 28 days to inherit under intestacy at all.
Who the rules do not see
This is the part that causes the most damage. The intestacy rules recognise marriage, civil partnership and blood or legal relationships, and nothing else. An unmarried partner inherits nothing, however long you lived together and whatever you called each other. A stepchild you raised from a toddler inherits nothing unless you formally adopted them. Close friends, godchildren and charities inherit nothing. None of that reflects any view about your relationships. The rules were simply not built to notice them.
Take Denise, 58, a fictional example that will feel uncomfortably familiar to some readers. She had lived with her partner for nineteen years in a house held in her sole name, and had two adult children from an earlier marriage. She never remarried and never made a will. Under the intestacy rules her estate passed to her children, and her partner of nineteen years had no automatic entitlement to anything, including the house he lived in. He could apply to the court under separate legislation, but that means solicitors, cost, delay and an argument with people he had known for two decades, at the worst possible time.
The practical difficulties compound it. Administering an intestate estate usually takes longer and costs more than administering one with a clear will, because there is more to establish and nobody has been appointed to do it. Where young children are involved, there is no named guardian, so the decision goes to the courts. Families that were perfectly harmonious can find themselves on opposite sides of a process none of them chose.
The 2027 change that raises the stakes
One development makes this more pressing than it was. From 6 April 2027, most unused pension funds and lump sum death benefits will be counted as part of your estate for inheritance tax. Pensions have sat outside the estate for years, which is exactly why so many people have a large pension and a modest will, or no will at all. With the nil rate band frozen at £325,000 until April 2031 and the residence nil rate band at £175,000, bringing pensions into the calculation will pull estates over the threshold that were previously nowhere near it.
A will does not control your pension, though, and this catches people out. Who receives a pension on death is normally decided by the scheme, guided by your expression of wishes or nomination form, not by your will. Jointly owned property often passes automatically to the survivor too, outside the will entirely. A will is the centre of the plan rather than the whole of it, and the pieces around it need to point the same way.
In summary
Without a will, the law applies a formula that takes no account of unmarried partners, stepchildren or anything you would have wanted. It also tends to make a difficult time slower and more expensive for the people you leave behind. Writing one puts you back in charge of the decision, and with pensions joining the estate for inheritance tax in April 2027, it is a good moment to check that your will, your nomination forms and how your property is owned are all telling the same story.
Will writing itself sits with a solicitor, but how your pensions, investments and protection fit around it is very much our territory. If you would like to talk through how your affairs are arranged, and what the 2027 pension changes mean for your family, do get in touch with ACJ.