What happens if you die without a will: the intestacy rules explained

If you die without a valid will in England & Wales, you die 'intestate'. The Administration of Estates Act 1925 (as amended) sets out who inherits, in what shares, and in what order. The rules are not customised to your relationships — they look only at marriage / civil partnership and at blood. They were last meaningfully updated in 2014, when the threshold for the surviving spouse was increased; the underlying structure is a hundred years old.

If you are married or in a civil partnership

If you die leaving a spouse or civil partner and no children, your spouse takes the whole estate. If you leave a spouse and children, your spouse takes all your personal possessions, the first £322,000 of the estate (the 'statutory legacy', as of 2025), and half of anything above that. The other half passes to your children in equal shares (held on trust until they turn 18). This is sometimes a surprise — many people assume the surviving spouse takes everything.

If you are not married — even if you have lived together for decades

Cohabiting partners do not feature in the intestacy rules at all. There is no 'common-law spouse' status in England & Wales. If you die intestate, your unmarried partner inherits nothing automatically — even if you have shared a home for thirty years and raised children together. They may be able to apply to the court for provision under the 1975 Act if they have lived with you for at least two years immediately before the death, but that is a court application, brought in grief, with legal costs.

If you have children but no surviving spouse

Your children inherit the whole estate in equal shares. If a child has died before you leaving children of their own, those grandchildren take their parent's share between them ('per stirpes'). Stepchildren do not feature unless you legally adopted them — they are not 'children' for intestacy purposes.

If you have neither spouse nor children

The estate passes in this order: parents (in equal shares); then full siblings (and the children of any siblings who have died before you); then half siblings; then grandparents; then full uncles and aunts (and their children); then half uncles and aunts. If none of those people are alive, the estate passes to the Crown — to the Treasury Solicitor's Bona Vacantia division.

What's missing from the rules

Friends, godchildren, ex-partners, charities, neighbours, the colleague who became family — none of these feature. Pets cannot inherit. The neighbour who has cared for you for a decade has no claim. The university you'd love to leave a small bequest to has no place in the rules. None of this is the intestacy rules being unkind; it is simply that they were written for a different question, in a different century.

Why a will costs less than the alternative

Estates dealt with under the intestacy rules tend to take longer to administer than those with a valid will, often cost more in legal fees, and are more likely to involve disputes between potential beneficiaries. A simple, well-drafted will short-circuits all of that — it tells the executors what to do and removes the need for them (or the court) to guess.

Velati's whole reason for existing is that the gap between the intestacy rules and the family you actually have can be very large. We've built the questionnaire to make closing that gap straightforward — twenty minutes online, half an hour with two witnesses, and the document is yours.