By far the most common person to benefit from a Will is the spouse or partner of the person who has died. Indeed, even if there is no Will your spouse or civil partner would inherit the majority of your estate under the intestacy rules. Partly to reflect the fact that most people do pass their assets onto their partner, spouses and civil partners have a special position when it comes to inheritance tax.

In the UK there is a spouse or civil partner exemption. Any gift to them is free of inheritance tax. This means that if you give your whole estate to your spouse or civil partner, then there will be no inheritance tax to pay. If you are planning to transfer your entire estate to your spouse or civil partner, it is worth being aware of the inheritance tax threshold, and how it can be transferred to help reduce your future tax bill.

If you have divorced or your civil partnership has come to an end, then your Will remains valid, but any part of it which was to benefit your ex-spouse or civil partner is revoked. If that person was the only beneficiary of your Will, and you did not include any default beneficiaries, then your estate will be dealt with according to the rules of intestacy.

It makes no difference whether your Will:

If you wish to benefit a former partner by your Will, you would have to make a new Will after the divorce or dissolution becomes final.

Many people form new relationships, but of course they retain ties created while they were in a former one. A typical situation is that when a couple get married, each of them brings their own property to the marriage. If either of them has children by a previous relationship, they often want their children to receive their property. So it is common to leave a life interest in the property to the surviving spouse, to pass to those children when that spouse dies. If the property in question were the house, this would enable the surviving spouse to carry on living there for their lifetime.

If you have remarried or entered a new civil partnership since making your Will, then the Will is automatically revoked. So unless you make a new Will, your estate will be dealt with on your death under the rules of intestacy.

This is why it is crucially important to make a new Will when you remarry or enter a new civil partnership.

Remember that if you made a new Will after your dissolution or divorce in order to make provision for your ex-partner, you would need to do so again when you enter a new marriage or civil partnership.

It is possible to make a Will ‘in contemplation’ of marriage or civil partnership. Your Will would say that you are expecting to be married or form a civil partnership to a particular person, and would state that:

The Will would come into effect immediately, so that if you were to die before the ceremony it would be valid. However, you can choose to make the Will conditional, so that it only comes into effect if the marriage or civil partnership does take place. Then if you were to die before that event, or the engagement were broken off, the Will would not stand.

It is usual for a Will to contain a provision that states that a beneficiary will only receive their inheritance if they survive you by a specified period of time, typically 30 days. This prevents your assets passing to someone who dies either at the same time as you, or shortly afterwards.

This sort of provision is called a survivorship provision. Without a survivorship provision in a Will, there is the risk of double taxation as there may be inheritance tax to pay on both your estate and the beneficiary’s estate. In addition, your assets will then pass in accordance with the beneficiary’s Will, whereas you may have preferred for them to go to someone else.

A survivorship provision does not apply to:

If it did, the administration of your estate could be slowed up.

There is one situation where a standard survivorship provision may not be appropriate. If a couple die together in an accident, where it is impossible to tell who has died first, a standard survivorship provision can have inheritance tax disadvantages.

In this scenario, the law says that the older partner is deemed to have died first. So, if the older partner has left their residuary estate to the younger partner, it is necessary to ensure the law prevails in the older partner’s Will by disapplying the standard survivorship provision. By doing this, the older partner is deemed to have died first and their estate will pass first to the younger partner, securing the spouse exemption from inheritance tax.