Between the venue deposit, the guest list and the seating plan, updating your will is not the first thing on anyone’s wedding to-do list. Most people assume that if they already have a will, that box is ticked.
Here is the part that surprises almost everyone: in England and Wales, getting married or entering a civil partnership automatically cancels any will you made beforehand. Not amends it. Cancels it. Unless your will was written in a very specific way, the moment you say “I do” you are treated as having no will at all — and the law decides what happens to your estate instead of you. It is one of the oldest rules on the books, it is under review right now, and it still catches families out every year.
The rule nobody mentions at the wedding
The rule comes from section 18 of the Wills Act 1837, and it has barely changed since. Marriage or civil partnership revokes any earlier will, regardless of how recently you made it or how carefully you thought it through.
It applies to second and third marriages just as much as first ones. If you made a will after a divorce to protect your children, then remarried a few years later, that will was revoked on the wedding day unless it was drafted with the new marriage in mind.
Nobody flags it to you. There is no warning at the register office. Most people only find out when a family member dies and their solicitor has to explain why the will in the drawer no longer counts.
What happens if you die without a valid will
If your will has been revoked and you have not made a new one, you die intestate — meaning the intestacy rules decide who inherits, in a fixed order set by law.
Those rules are blunt. Your spouse or civil partner receives your personal possessions, a fixed sum known as the statutory legacy (currently £322,000), and half of anything above that. The rest is divided between your children. If you have no children, your spouse usually takes everything.
That produces outcomes people rarely intend:
- Children from a previous relationship receive far less than you planned, or nothing at all
- A stepchild you raised inherits nothing, because the rules only recognise biological and legally adopted children
- Specific gifts you wanted to leave to siblings, friends or charities simply disappear
- A family business or property is split in a way that forces a sale
The wishes were real. They just no longer had a valid document behind them.
The exception: a will made in contemplation of marriage
There is a way to keep an existing will alive through a wedding. If a will is made “in contemplation of marriage” to a named person, and it says clearly that it should not be revoked when that marriage takes place, it survives the wedding day.
The wording matters. A vague reference to your partner, or a will made while you happened to be engaged, is not enough — it needs to name the person you intend to marry and state that the will stands afterwards. This is straightforward for a solicitor to draft, and it is one of the reasons a DIY will can fail at exactly the wrong moment.
If you are engaged and already have a will, raise it before the wedding rather than after.
Divorce works differently — and that trips people up too
Many people assume the opposite rule applies to divorce. It does not. Divorce or dissolution does not revoke your will.
Instead, your former spouse is treated as though they died before you. Any gift to them fails and they cannot act as your executor, but the rest of the will stands. That sounds tidy, but it leaves real gaps: if your ex-spouse was your sole beneficiary, the gift falls away and the estate may pass under the intestacy rules anyway. If they were your only named executor, nobody is left to administer the estate.
So marriage cancels a will and divorce does not. Both are good moments to review what you have.
The rule may be changing — but it has not changed yet
In May 2025, the Law Commission published its final report on modernising wills law, along with a draft Bill for a new Wills Act. Among its recommendations is scrapping the rule that marriage automatically revokes a will.
Part of the reasoning is a growing concern about “predatory marriage” — where someone marries a vulnerable person, often an elderly person with reduced capacity, specifically to revoke their will and inherit under the intestacy rules. It is a form of financial abuse that the current rule makes far easier.
It is now for the Government to decide whether to take the recommendations forward. Until Parliament passes new legislation, the 1837 rule remains the law in England and Wales — so if you are getting married this year, it applies to you.
How Dudden Law Can Help
Our wills and probate team in Cardiff deals with this more often than you would expect, usually after the fact. It is a much easier conversation before the wedding than after a bereavement.
If you are getting married, recently married, or going through a divorce, we can review what you already have, draft a new will, or prepare one in contemplation of your marriage so it survives the day. We will also make sure it works alongside the rest of your arrangements — how your home is owned, who you have named as executor, and whether a lasting power of attorney is worth putting in place at the same time.
Insights from Carrieanne Greenway
