Dying without a will: how intestacy divides what you leave behind

A couple have lived together for eleven years. They own a home, share finances, and have built something that feels, in every practical sense, like a family. Then one of them dies without a will. Under the law of England and Wales, the surviving partner inherits nothing automatically. The estate passes instead to blood relatives the deceased may barely have known. This is not an edge case. It is the default.

Roughly half of adults in England and Wales do not have a valid will. Many assume the law will follow common sense, or that a long relationship confers some automatic right. It does not. The intestacy rules, set out in the Administration of Estates Act 1925 and amended most recently by the Inheritance and Trustees' Powers Act 2014, are a fixed statutory formula. They have no mechanism for affection, intent, or circumstance.

Who inherits, and in what order

The intestacy rules work through a hierarchy. If the deceased was married or in a civil partnership at the time of death, the spouse or civil partner inherits first. If there are also surviving children, the spouse takes all personal chattels, the first £322,000 of the estate (the current statutory legacy figure, though this is reviewed periodically and you should verify the current amount), and half of whatever remains. The children share the other half equally, held in trust until they reach eighteen.

If there are no children, the spouse takes everything.

If there is no spouse or civil partner, the estate passes down a list of relatives in strict order: children, then grandchildren, then parents, then siblings, then half-siblings, then grandparents, then aunts and uncles, then half-aunts and half-uncles. If no qualifying relative can be found, the estate passes to the Crown as bona vacantia, the legal term for ownerless property.

Two categories of people are conspicuously absent from this list. Unmarried partners receive nothing, regardless of how long the relationship lasted or how intertwined their finances were. Stepchildren receive nothing either, unless they were formally adopted. The rules recognise legal relationships only. Emotional ones count for nothing within the formula itself.

An unmarried partner is not without any recourse. A claim may be possible under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, which allows certain dependants to apply to court for reasonable financial provision. But this requires litigation, involves cost and delay, and offers no certainty. It is a remedy for a problem that a will would have prevented entirely.

What happens to the house, accounts, and everything else

Intestacy creates practical difficulties that go beyond who receives what. If the deceased owned a property solely in their name, the estate must be administered before anything can be transferred. This requires a grant of letters of administration from the Probate Registry, because there is no executor named in a will to act. The people entitled to apply are determined by the same intestacy hierarchy, which can create conflict if family relationships are strained.

Property held as joint tenants passes automatically to the surviving co-owner by right of survivorship, outside the estate entirely. This is one area where the outcome may align with what the deceased wanted, provided the ownership structure was set up correctly. Property held as tenants in common, however, does not pass automatically. The deceased's share falls into the estate and is distributed according to the intestacy rules, which can leave a surviving partner owning only part of the home they live in, alongside the deceased's children or other relatives.

Bank accounts held solely in the deceased's name are frozen on death. Joint accounts generally pass to the surviving account holder, but again this depends on how the account was structured. Savings bonds, ISAs held in a sole name, and share portfolios all form part of the estate and pass under the intestacy formula.

Life insurance and pension death benefits are different again. These are typically written in trust or nominated to a named beneficiary, so they usually fall outside the estate. But if no nomination was ever made, or if the nomination is outdated, the money may end up in the estate and distributed in ways the deceased never intended.

The cumulative picture is one of fragmentation. An estate that the deceased thought of as a single coherent whole, a home, savings, an investment account, a pension, is governed by several different legal regimes at once. Intestacy adds uncertainty on top of complexity.

The families most likely to be surprised by intestacy are those whose lives do not fit the traditional template: blended families, unmarried couples, people estranged from relatives they have never formally disinherited, and those with assets in more than one country. The rules were not designed for them, and they provide no comfort.

Glenvault helps families store the documents that make estate administration straightforward, whether or not a will exists. If you are ready to bring order to your family's records, you can start at glenvault.com/signup.