How to make a will in the UK: a step-by-step guide

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Most people know they should have a will. Most people don’t have one. If you’re one of the roughly six in ten UK adults without a will, you’re not being irresponsible — you’re being human. Writing a will means thinking about your own death, which is exactly the kind of task that stays at the bottom of the to-do list forever.

But here’s the problem with putting it off: if you die without a will, you don’t get to decide what happens to your money, your house, or who looks after your kids. The law decides for you, using a set of rules called intestacy. Those rules don’t care that you’d meant to leave something to your sister, or that you and your partner never got round to marrying, or that you wanted your stepchildren included. They follow a fixed formula — and for unmarried couples especially, the results can be brutal.

This guide walks through exactly how to make a will in the UK, step by step, without the legal jargon. You’ll come away knowing what you actually need to decide, what it costs, and how to avoid the mistakes that make wills get challenged or thrown out.

Why intestacy rules catch so many people out

If you die without a valid will in England or Wales, your estate is divided according to the rules of intestacy. Here’s the part that surprises most people: being someone’s partner for 20 years means nothing under these rules if you’re not married or in a civil partnership. Your partner could inherit nothing, while your estranged parents or siblings inherit everything.

Even for married couples, intestacy doesn’t always give the surviving spouse the full estate. If you have children, your spouse gets the first £322,000 (as of 2026, this figure is reviewed periodically) plus half of what’s left — the children get the rest. That might mean your spouse has to sell the family home to pay out a share to an 8-year-old.

Scotland has different intestacy rules, and so does Northern Ireland. If any of this sounds like it wouldn’t match what you’d actually want, that’s the whole point of writing a will — it overrides these default rules entirely.

Step 1: Work out what you actually own

Before you write anything, list your assets and debts. This is less daunting than it sounds — most people’s estates are simpler than they think.

Include:
– Property (your share, if jointly owned)
– Savings and current accounts
– Investments, ISAs, and pensions (note: pensions usually sit outside your will — more on that below)
– Life insurance payouts
– Valuable possessions (cars, jewellery, art)
– Debts, including mortgages

This list is also useful for your executor later, so keep it somewhere accessible — not just in your head.

Step 2: Decide who gets what

This is the emotional part, but it’s also where most of the legal headaches start. Be specific. “Everything to my family” is vague and can cause disputes. Decide:

• Who are your main beneficiaries (the people who inherit)?
• Are there specific gifts you want to make — a piece of jewellery to a named person, a sum of money to a charity?
• What happens if a beneficiary dies before you? This is called a “residuary clause” or backup plan, and a good will includes one.
• If you have children under 18, who should be their legal guardian if both parents die? This is one of the few decisions a will genuinely can’t be replicated any other way.

If you’re in a blended family — second marriage, stepchildren, children from a previous relationship — this step matters even more. Intestacy rules often exclude stepchildren entirely unless you’ve legally adopted them.

Step 3: Choose your executor

Your executor is the person (or people) responsible for carrying out your will — paying debts, distributing assets, dealing with HMRC on inheritance tax if relevant. You can appoint up to four executors, though two is usually plenty.

Choose someone organised and willing to do paperwork, not necessarily your closest relative. It’s increasingly common to appoint a solicitor as a professional executor, especially for complicated estates — this costs money from the estate but removes the burden from a grieving family member.

Ask the person first. Being an executor is unpaid work and can take months.

Step 4: Decide how to write it — DIY, online service, or solicitor

This is where most people get stuck, so here’s a straight comparison.

For most people with a house, a pension, and a family, a solicitor is worth the cost. Mistakes in DIY wills — missing signatures, unclear wording, witnesses who are also beneficiaries — are a leading cause of wills being contested or declared invalid after someone’s died, which is the worst possible time for it to go wrong.

Step 5: Sign it correctly — this is where DIY wills most often fail

A will isn’t valid just because you wrote it down and meant it. In England and Wales, it must be:

• In writing
• Signed by you, in the presence of two witnesses, both physically present at the same time
• Signed by both witnesses, in your presence, straight after

Critically: a witness (or their spouse) cannot be a beneficiary of the will. If they are, that gift to them becomes void — even though the rest of the will still stands. This single rule trips up more DIY wills than almost anything else.

The misconception that catches people out: “My pension is covered by my will”

It isn’t, usually. Pensions typically sit outside your estate and aren’t distributed by your will. Instead, you tell your pension provider who should receive the death benefit using a separate “expression of wish” or “nomination of beneficiary” form, held directly by the pension scheme.

This matters because people write a will, feel sorted, and never update their pension nomination — so decades later, an ex-partner named on an old pension form could end up inheriting a pension pot, regardless of what the will says. Check your nomination with every workplace pension and personal pension you hold, and update it whenever your circumstances change. The same applies to life insurance policies written in trust.

Step 6: Store it somewhere findable

A perfectly written will is useless if no one can find it when you die. Options include:

• At home in a fireproof box, with your executor told exactly where
• With your solicitor, often for a small annual fee or free if they wrote it
• Registered with the National Will Register — a searchable database solicitors check when someone dies

Tell your executor where it is. Don’t just assume someone will stumble across it.

Step 7: Review it every few years — and after major life events

A will isn’t a one-off task. Review it after:

• Marriage or divorce (in England and Wales, marriage automatically cancels an existing will unless it was made specifically in anticipation of that marriage)
• Having children or grandchildren
• Buying property
• A beneficiary or executor dying
• A significant change in what you own

Set a reminder every three to five years to reread it, even if nothing obvious has changed.

What happens if you don’t bother

To make the stakes concrete: without a will, your estate goes through intestacy, your family has to apply to the court for a “grant of letters of administration” instead of the simpler probate process, it typically takes longer, and unmarried partners can be left with nothing — no matter how long you were together or what you’d always said you intended. For digital assets, business interests, or anyone with children from more than one relationship, the gap between what you’d want and what the law defaults to tends to be even wider.

You can check the current intestacy rules for England and Wales on gov.uk if you want to see exactly what would happen to your estate right now, today, without a will. For most people, that’s a sobering enough read to finally get it sorted.

The bottom line

• List your assets and decide your beneficiaries before you contact anyone — it makes the actual writing much faster.
• If you own property, have children, or have a blended family, pay for a solicitor rather than risk a DIY kit. The cost is small compared to the risk of an invalid will.
• Check your pension and life insurance nomination forms separately — your will doesn’t automatically cover these.
• Get it signed correctly: two independent witnesses, present at the same time, neither of them a beneficiary.
• Tell your executor where the will is kept, and put a reminder in your calendar to review it every few years or after any major life change.

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