Most people assume that if they die without a will, their husband, wife or partner simply gets everything. It feels obvious. It is also wrong. When someone dies without a valid will in England and Wales, a fixed set of statutory rules called the rules of intestacy take over, and those rules decide who inherits the estate. They take no account of what you would have wanted, who you actually lived with, or who relied on you. They follow a rigid order of blood relatives, and they have caught out a lot of ordinary families who thought they were sorted.
This guide explains exactly what happens if you die without a will in the UK: who inherits, how much they get, the myth that costs unmarried couples dearly, and the practical mess that lands on the family left behind. The figures here apply to England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own separate intestacy rules.
Dying without a valid will is known as dying intestate. When that happens, the rules of intestacy set out in the Administration of Estates Act 1925 decide who is legally entitled to inherit the estate. The estate is everything you own at death once debts, funeral costs and any tax have been paid: the house, savings, the car, personal possessions, the lot.
The key thing to understand is that intestacy is not flexible. A will lets you say exactly who gets what. Intestacy does the opposite. It applies a one-size-fits-all formula based purely on your family relationships at the date of death. If your circumstances do not fit the formula neatly, and most modern families do not, the outcome can be very different from anything you would have chosen. You can read the official position on the GOV.UK guidance on intestacy, which sets out the statutory order in full.
This is where the biggest misunderstanding lives. A surviving spouse or civil partner does not automatically inherit the whole estate when there are children involved.
If you are married or in a civil partnership and you have no children, your spouse or civil partner inherits everything. Simple enough. But if you have children, the rules split the estate. Your surviving spouse or civil partner receives all your personal possessions, the first £322,000 of the estate (this is the current statutory legacy figure), and half of whatever is left above that amount. The other half is divided equally between your children.
For many families with a house, that £322,000 threshold matters enormously. If the family home pushes the estate well above it, the surviving spouse can end up legally sharing ownership of part of the estate with the children. In some cases that has forced a surviving partner to sell the family home to release the children's share. It is rarely what the person who died had in mind. If your estate planning needs to protect a surviving partner properly, this is exactly the kind of situation our wills and estate planning team exists to prevent.
There is no such thing as common-law marriage in England and Wales. This single fact catches out more people than almost anything else in estate planning.
If you live with a partner but are not married or in a civil partnership, your partner inherits nothing under the rules of intestacy. It does not matter if you have been together for thirty years. It does not matter if you have children together. It does not matter if the house is your shared home. The intestacy rules simply do not recognise an unmarried partner as a beneficiary.
In that situation, the estate passes to the deceased's children, or if there are none, to their parents, siblings or other blood relatives in strict order. The surviving partner can be left with no automatic right to the home they have lived in for decades. Their only route is to bring a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, which means going to court, paying legal costs, and proving financial dependency, all while grieving. A single will would have avoided every bit of that.
If you have children and no surviving spouse or civil partner, your estate is divided equally between your children when they reach 18. If a child has already died, their share passes down to their own children. Stepchildren you never legally adopted do not inherit under intestacy, even if you raised them as your own.
There is a second, often overlooked problem. Intestacy decides who inherits your money. It does not decide who raises your children. A will is where you name a legal guardian for any children under 18. Die without one, and the decision about who looks after them falls to the courts, who may choose someone you would never have picked. For parents, this is frequently the single most compelling reason to put a will in place, well ahead of the money.
When someone dies intestate with no surviving spouse, civil partner or children, the rules of intestacy work through blood relatives in a set order: first parents, then brothers and sisters (and their children), then grandparents, then aunts and uncles (and their children).
If absolutely no relatives can be traced, the entire estate passes to the Crown under a legal process called bona vacantia, which simply means ownerless goods. Each year, estates worth millions end up with the government this way, purely because the person who died left no will and had no traceable family. Anyone who wants their money to go to a friend, a partner, a charity or a chosen cause, rather than the state, can only secure that through a valid will.
Beyond who inherits, dying without a will creates real administrative friction for the people left behind. With no will, there is no named executor, so a close relative has to apply for letters of administration before anyone has legal authority to deal with the estate. Until that grant arrives, bank accounts can be frozen and the property cannot be sold or transferred, which can hold up any onward conveyancing the family is relying on.
The order of who is entitled to apply is fixed by law, which can cause friction in blended families or where relationships are strained. The process is often slower and more stressful than a straightforward probate with a clear will and named executor. A will naming the right executor, and handled alongside a properly structured estate plan, removes most of that uncertainty before it ever lands on your family.
There is also the tax dimension. Intestacy gives you no opportunity to plan around inheritance tax. A will can be structured to use available allowances and reliefs efficiently; intestacy simply applies the default split and leaves any inheritance tax to fall where it lands. For estates near or above the inheritance tax threshold, that lack of planning can mean a larger tax bill than was ever necessary.
(Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and may change in future.)
Not always. A surviving spouse or civil partner inherits the first £322,000 of the estate plus all personal possessions, then half of anything above that figure. The other half is shared between the children. Your spouse only inherits the entire estate if you have no children.
No. The rules of intestacy do not recognise an unmarried partner, however long you have lived together, because common-law marriage does not exist in England and Wales. An unmarried partner inherits nothing automatically and would have to claim through the courts under the 1975 Act.
A close relative must apply for letters of administration from the Probate Registry to become the administrator. Until that grant is issued, no one has the legal authority to access the bank accounts, sell the property or distribute anything.
Your estate is divided equally between your children at 18, but intestacy does not decide who raises them. Without a will naming a guardian, the courts decide who looks after any children under 18, which may not be who you would have chosen.
If no relatives can be traced under the intestacy rules, the whole estate passes to the Crown under bona vacantia. A will is the only way to direct your money to a chosen person, partner or charity instead of the state.
Dying without a will hands one of the most personal decisions of your life to a rigid statutory formula. It assumes a family shape that fewer and fewer people actually have, it ignores unmarried partners entirely, and it leaves the people closest to you with a slower, harder job at the worst possible time. The fix is not complicated. A clear, properly drafted will puts you back in control of who inherits, who looks after your children, and how much hassle your family faces. If you have been meaning to sort it, this is the thing worth sorting first.