What Happens If You Die Without a Will in the UK?

If you die without a valid will in England and Wales, you're said to have died "intestate," and your estate is distributed according to a fixed legal formula known as the intestacy rules — not according to what you might have wanted, and not according to any informal promises you made. This is one of the clearest reasons to write a will even if your estate feels modest.

The basic order of priority

Intestacy rules follow a strict hierarchy. In simplified terms: a spouse or civil partner is first in line, followed by children, then parents, then siblings, and further down the family tree if none of those exist. Unmarried partners — however long the relationship — have no automatic right to inherit under intestacy rules at all, regardless of how the relationship felt in practice.

Married or in a civil partnership, with children

If you're married or in a civil partnership and have children, your spouse or civil partner typically receives your personal belongings, a fixed statutory sum (set by law and reviewed periodically), and a share of anything remaining, with the rest split among your children. The exact statutory amount changes over time, so it isn't useful to quote a specific figure here — check GOV.UK for the current rules if this situation applies to you.

Married with no children

If you're married or in a civil partnership with no children, your spouse or civil partner generally inherits everything under intestacy, ahead of parents or siblings.

Unmarried couples get nothing automatically

This is the detail that catches the most people out: if you're living with a partner but not married or in a civil partnership, they have no automatic right to inherit anything under intestacy, no matter how long you were together or how intertwined your finances are. They may be able to make a claim through the courts in some circumstances (the same Inheritance Act route covered in our guide to challenging wills and estates), but this is stressful, uncertain, and avoidable entirely by writing a will — for couples, usually a pair of mirror wills. One caveat: a jointly owned home held as joint tenants passes to the surviving co-owner outside these rules entirely — how joint property interacts with wills explains the difference.

What happens to children under 18

If children inherit under intestacy while under 18, their share is typically held in trust until they reach adulthood, managed by appointed trustees — this may not match how you'd actually want money managed for a child at different ages, which a will can specify more flexibly (see trusts in wills). Intestacy also appoints no guardians: who raises the children falls to the family court, which is precisely what a guardian clause in a will exists to settle in advance.

What if there is no family at all?

If no qualifying relative can be found under the intestacy rules, the estate can ultimately pass to the Crown — this is genuinely rare, but illustrates how rigid the fallback rules are compared with simply stating your own wishes in a will.

Why this matters even for modest estates

It's a common misconception that intestacy rules only matter for large estates. In reality, they affect anyone without a will, regardless of size — the family home, savings, and personal possessions are all distributed under the same fixed formula, which is exactly why even a simple will matters for most adults, not just the wealthy.

This is general information about the law in England and Wales, not personalised legal advice. Rules, thresholds and processes change, and Scotland and Northern Ireland have different rules in places — for anything that depends on your own circumstances, it is worth speaking to a solicitor (ideally one accredited by STEP or Solicitors for the Elderly) or checking GOV.UK and Citizens Advice for current detail.