Dying without a will: who inherits under the intestacy rules

Who inherits when there is no will

Dying without a valid will is called dying intestate. The estate is then distributed under the rules in section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925, as amended by the Inheritance and Trustees' Powers Act 2014. These rules are statutory and mandatory. There is no discretion in them, no scope for an administrator to be fair, and no weight given to what the deceased said they wanted, what they wrote in an unsigned draft, or what everybody in the family knows they intended.

The rules also apply to a partial intestacy - where a will exists but fails to dispose of the whole estate, perhaps because a beneficiary died first and no substitute was named. That part of the estate falls into intestacy while the rest passes under the will.

Two structural points that catch people out. First, the list is strictly hierarchical: you only move down a category when nobody in the category above survives. A single living parent excludes every sibling, cousin and grandparent. Second, representation runs through most categories - if a child, sibling, or uncle who would have inherited died before the deceased, their own children step into their shoes and share what that person would have taken.

One important detail on spouses: a husband, wife or civil partner inherits only if they were still legally married or in the civil partnership at the date of death. Separation, however permanent and however many years ago, changes nothing - a spouse you have not spoken to in fifteen years inherits in full if the divorce was never finalised. Conversely, a decree absolute or final order ends the entitlement completely. The surviving spouse must also survive the deceased by 28 days; if they die within that period the estate is distributed as if they had not survived at all.

Who gets nothing - the part that shocks people

It is worth being concrete about the scale of this. Where a cohabiting couple own their home as tenants in common and one dies intestate leaving adult children from a first marriage, the surviving partner can find themselves co-owning the house they live in with people who want it sold. The intestacy rules give those children a share of the deceased's half; the surviving partner has no entitlement to buy them out, no right to remain, and no statutory protection beyond what a court might award on a 1975 Act claim months later.

The joint tenants exception - and why it matters so much

There is one very significant qualification to everything above, and for cohabiting couples it is often the difference between keeping a home and losing it. Assets held as joint tenants do not form part of the estate at all. They pass automatically to the surviving co-owner by survivorship, the moment of death, entirely outside the intestacy rules and without needing a grant.

Worked examples - the split in pounds

Abstract fractions are hard to argue with. Actual numbers are not. Here is the standard case that trips people up: a married person dies intestate leaving a spouse and two children, with a net estate of £600,000.

Change one variable and the answer changes completely. On a £300,000 estate with the same family, the whole lot goes to the spouse and the children get nothing, because the estate never reaches the £322,000 statutory legacy. Remove the marriage certificate - same couple, same house, same two children, thirty years together but never married - and the partner's entitlement drops to zero, with the entire £600,000 passing to the two children.

Work out the split for your own situation

Choose the family situation as it stood at the date of death and enter the net value of the estate - that is, after debts, funeral costs and any inheritance tax, and excluding anything held as joint tenants or paid outside the estate.

Three situations where the rules go wrong

If you have been left out - your two options

Parliament knew a set of fixed rules would occasionally produce results nobody wanted, so two mechanisms exist to correct them. One goes through the courts; the other depends on the agreement of the people who did inherit. Both have hard deadlines.

Claims under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975

The 1975 Act lets the court override the intestacy rules and award you reasonable financial provision from the estate. It does not entitle you to an equal share, and it is not a way of guessing what the deceased would have wanted. For everyone except a spouse, the standard applied is what is reasonable for your maintenance.

The categories of person who can claim include a spouse or civil partner, a former spouse who has not remarried, a cohabitee who lived with the deceased as their husband, wife or civil partner for at least two years immediately before the death, a child of the deceased of any age, a person treated as a child of the family in relation to a marriage or civil partnership, and any person who was being maintained wholly or partly by the deceased immediately before death. The court weighs the applicant's financial resources and needs, the obligations the deceased had towards them, the size of the estate, any disability, and the competing needs of the beneficiaries.

The six-month deadline runs from the date the grant is issued, not from the death. The court has a discretion to extend it but exercises that sparingly, and permission is a separate battle before you get anywhere near the merits.

Deeds of variation

A deed of variation is the family's own fix, and where relations are civil it is almost always the better one. Someone who has inherited under the intestacy rules simply agrees, in writing, to redirect some or all of their entitlement elsewhere. To work, it must be:

• made in writing and signed by every beneficiary giving something up;
• completed within two years of the date of death;
• clear about which assets or shares are being redirected, and to whom;
• free of any payment or consideration passing the other way, other than another variation of the same estate;
• supported by the right statements if the tax treatment matters - a statement under section 142 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984 for inheritance tax, and section 62(6) of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992 for capital gains tax. With those in place, the redirected gift is treated as having been made by the deceased, so the person giving it up is not treated as making a lifetime gift of their own.

The catch is that a beneficiary under 18, or one who lacks mental capacity, cannot enter into a variation without court approval - which is a common obstacle in exactly the blended-family situations where a variation would help most.

Letters of administration - who applies and how

With no will there is no executor, and therefore no grant of probate. Instead an entitled relative applies to become the administrator and receives a grant of letters of administration. The document does the same job as probate - it is the court's confirmation of authority to collect in the assets, settle the debts and distribute what is left - but it arises differently and behaves differently.

The priority order to apply is set by the Non-Contentious Probate Rules and broadly mirrors entitlement to the estate: surviving spouse or civil partner, then children, then parents, then full siblings, then half siblings, then grandparents, then uncles and aunts. Anyone in a higher category outranks everyone below, and where several people share a rank - four siblings, say - any one of them may apply, with up to four named on a single grant. An unmarried partner cannot apply, because they have no entitlement.

The court fee is £526 for estates over £5,000, raised from £300 on 13 July 2026, with extra copies of the grant at £2 each ordered alongside the application. Our probate cost calculator compares doing it yourself against fixed-fee and percentage-based professional routes, and the probate costs guide sets out the full picture.

If you are new to the whole process, start with what is probate and then applying for probate - the mechanics of the application are much the same whichever grant you need.

The inheritance tax consequence of dying intestate

Intestacy is not tax-neutral. It can create an inheritance tax bill that a will would have avoided entirely, and the reason is the spouse exemption.

Anything passing to a spouse or civil partner is exempt from inheritance tax without limit. There is no equivalent exemption for an unmarried partner, however long the relationship. So where a cohabiting couple's assets end up passing to children, siblings or a partner outside marriage, the value is tested against the nil-rate band of £325,000 and taxed at 40% above it.

The residence nil-rate band of up to £175,000 makes it worse. It only applies where a qualifying home passes to direct descendants - children, grandchildren, and legally adopted, step and foster children in that specific definition. A surviving unmarried partner is not a direct descendant, so a home passing to them attracts no residence nil-rate band at all. A married couple can also transfer any unused nil-rate band and residence nil-rate band to the survivor; an unmarried couple cannot transfer anything.

How to fix it - and the two events that break a will

Every problem on this page has the same solution: a valid will. It removes the statutory rules entirely and lets you decide who inherits, in what shares, and who administers the estate. For most people it is a couple of hundred pounds and an afternoon.

To be valid in England and Wales a will must be:

• in writing, and made by someone aged 18 or over with the mental capacity to make it;
• made voluntarily, free of pressure from anyone else;
• signed by the person making it in the presence of two witnesses, who each then sign in their presence.

The witnesses must not be beneficiaries, and must not be married to or in a civil partnership with a beneficiary. If one is, the will remains valid but the gift to that beneficiary fails - and that failed gift then falls into a partial intestacy, distributed under exactly the rules described above.

Scotland and Northern Ireland have different rules

Everything on this page describes England and Wales. The other UK nations do not simply have different thresholds - they have different legal architecture.

Scotland protects survivors far more strongly through two mechanisms. Prior rights give a surviving spouse or civil partner defined entitlements in the family home, its furnishings and a cash sum, taken before anything else is divided. Legal rights then give the spouse and the children a fixed, indefeasible share of the moveable estate - money, investments and possessions rather than land - which cannot be defeated even by a will that says otherwise. That last point is a genuine structural difference: in England and Wales you can disinherit a child entirely; in Scotland you cannot fully do so as regards moveable property.

Northern Ireland operates its own statutory scheme with its own thresholds and share fractions, and its own probate office. The broad shape resembles England and Wales but the numbers and some of the fractions differ, so do not read across.

Where the deceased lived in one nation and held property in another, or moved late in life, take advice specific to those jurisdictions before distributing anything.