A wedding comes with a long list of things to change: the name, the address, the insurance, the joint account. Almost nobody is told the one that matters most. Does marriage revoke a will? In England and Wales, yes. On the day you marry or enter a civil partnership, any will you already had is cancelled. Not amended, not partly suspended: revoked, entirely, by operation of law. Thousands of couples come home from honeymoon believing they are covered by a document that no longer legally exists.
Does marriage revoke a will in England and Wales?
It does. Section 18 of the Wills Act 1837 states plainly that a will is revoked by the testator’s marriage, and forming a civil partnership was later given the same effect. No notice arrives, nothing is filed, and no solicitor is told. The revocation simply happens on the day of the ceremony, whether the marriage is a first or a fourth, whether anyone remembers the old will, and whether or not the couple already live as though married. It is also why a will found in a drawer years later can be worthless while looking perfectly valid: the signatures are real, the witnesses were real, and a wedding in between undid all of it.
Notice the limits of the rule. Engagement does nothing. Moving in together does nothing, which is a problem of its own, because an unmarried partner has no inheritance rights at all. Separation does nothing. And divorce does something quite different: the will survives and the former spouse is treated as having died, which is its own set of consequences.
Why the law works this way
The rule looks blunt until you see the thinking behind it. Marriage changes who has a legal and moral claim on you more than any other single event. Parliament’s assumption is that a will written before a marriage cannot have taken that marriage into account, and that the intestacy rules, which put a spouse first, land closer to what most newlyweds would actually want than a will drafted for a different life. For a young couple with no children and few assets, that assumption is usually right. It fails hardest in the cases where the old will was built with care: around children from an earlier relationship, a business, a family home, or a trust meant to hold money back until a child is old enough for it.
The exception: a will made in contemplation of marriage
The same section provides the escape hatch. A will is not revoked if it appears from the will itself that, when it was made, you were expecting to marry a particular person and you intended the will to survive that marriage. In practice this means an express clause naming your intended spouse, along the lines of "this will is made in contemplation of my marriage to Sarah Ellis and shall not be revoked by it". Good intentions held privately are no use, and a general "if I ever marry" is not enough either. The person has to be identified and the intention has to be on the page.
That clause earns its place whenever a wedding is planned, because engagements are long. Without it, a will signed during the engagement dies at the altar, leaving a couple back on the intestacy rules during exactly the months they are buying a house together and booking flights. There are also narrow technical exceptions covering gifts made in exercise of a power of appointment, which almost nobody encounters. The contemplation clause is the one that matters in real life.
What happens if you die newly married with an old will
You die intestate, and the intestacy rules decide everything. Leave a spouse and no children and your spouse inherits the whole estate, which is often near enough to what the old will said that nobody spots the difference. Leave a spouse and children and the estate splits: your spouse takes your personal possessions, the first £322,000 (the statutory legacy, set at that figure in July 2023) and half of anything above it, while your children share the rest, held for them until they are 18.
It is the second case that does the damage, and the losses tend to be the quiet ones:
- Children from an earlier relationship inherit only as your children under a fixed formula, which is frequently far less than the will gave them, and stepchildren inherit nothing at all
- Your executors lose their authority, because the appointment lived in the revoked will; the law then decides who may apply to administer the estate
- Guardians go too: an appointment of a guardian made in a will is revoked with it, so if neither parent survives, who raises your children returns to a family court
- Specific gifts vanish, every one of them: the ring to a niece, the cash legacy to a friend, the gift to a charity you supported for thirty years
- Age protections disappear: a trust holding a child’s share back until 21 or 25 goes with the will, and intestacy hands the money over at 18
Second marriages: where this hurts most
If you are marrying again and you have children from a first relationship, the will your wedding revoked is usually the one that protected them. Intestacy gives your new spouse the statutory legacy and half the remainder, outright, and they are then free to leave it wherever they like. That is sideways disinheritance arriving by accident rather than design. The structures that prevent it, a life interest trust over your share of the home being the common one, only exist inside a valid will, which is precisely what the marriage removed.
What to do, and when
- Marrying with no will: either make one after the wedding or make one before with a contemplation-of-marriage clause naming your spouse-to-be; both work, doing neither does not
- Marrying with a will already signed: treat it as expiring on the wedding day, and put a new will in the diary for the first quiet month afterwards
- Already married and unsure: compare the date on your will with the date on your marriage certificate, and if the will is older, assume you have no will
- As a couple: mirror wills are the standard answer, two matching wills leaving everything to each other and then to the children
- While you are at it: pension and death-in-service nominations pass outside a will completely, and after a wedding they routinely still name a parent or an ex
Making the new will properly
A post-wedding will is a small job with a large payoff, and it is the one piece of admin on the list that nobody else can do for you. Willful’s interview asks whether a marriage or civil partnership is on the way, and where it is, the contemplation-of-marriage wording goes into the will so the ceremony cannot undo it. Mirror wills are £99 each for a couple, a single will is £119, and every one is read by a named, SRA-regulated solicitor before you sign. If you would rather see the shape of the document first, the will types the interview supports show what a newly married couple, a blended family and a couple with young children each actually need. The wedding is the reason to do it. Fifteen minutes is the whole cost.