Most adults have no will: the estate-planning gap, country by country

Ask adults in four wealthy, high-literacy countries whether they have written a will, and most say no. This isn't a story about one careless nation. It's a pattern that turns up wherever anyone bothers to measure it, and in at least one of these countries it has been getting worse, not better.

Start with the United States. Caring.com's 2025 study, run with the polling firm YouGov across more than 2,500 adults, found that only 24% had a will. That figure was 33% in 2022, so the share of Americans with a will has fallen by roughly a quarter in three years. Cross to the United Kingdom and Canada Life's survey, conducted by Opinium among 2,000 adults in early 2024, found 51% had not written one. Canada looks much the same: the Angus Reid Institute polled 1,610 adults in early 2023 and put the share without a will at about half.

Australia rounds out the picture. A University of Queensland national prevalence survey found the same slope: will-making climbs steeply with age, close to universal among the oldest Australians while most young adults have nothing in place. Different samples, different pollsters, different legal systems, and yet the headline barely moves. Somewhere around half of adults, and often more, have never made a will.

The comforting story is that people without a will are people with nothing to leave. The surveys don't support it. When Caring.com asked Americans why they hadn't made a will, the most common answer wasn't poverty or complexity. It was that 43% simply hadn't gotten around to it. Procrastination, not hardship.

The British answers rhyme. In the Canada Life survey, 26% said they didn't think they had enough assets to justify a will, and 23% reckoned they had plenty of time. Another 15% avoided the subject because they didn't want to think or talk about death, and 14% didn't want to pay for one. The Canadian pattern was blunter still: the top reason people gave Angus Reid was simply feeling too young to worry about it.

Two beliefs do most of the damage. One is that a will is for the rich; the other is that there's no rush. Both feel reasonable in the moment, and both are wrong for almost everyone, because a will isn't really about the size of an estate. It's about who decides, and how much friction the people you leave behind have to push through before anything can be sorted out.

Age is the strongest predictor of who has a will, and it sets a quiet trap. Young adults are the least likely to have one: in the Canadian survey, four in five people under 35 had no will at all. The Australian data shows the same slope, climbing decade by decade until nearly everyone in the oldest group is covered. Read casually, that looks fine. Older people have wills, younger people will get one eventually, the system self-corrects.

It doesn't, because death doesn't wait for the plan. The reason older people are so well covered isn't that they were more responsible at 30. It's survivorship: the ones who died younger, before they got round to it, aren't in the over-70 column. Every year spent meaning to do it is a year the gap stays open.

And the middle years are more exposed than they feel. That's exactly the stretch when people have young children, a mortgage, a partner they may not have married, and money scattered across a dozen apps and accounts. The Australian researchers found that even many parents of dependent children had no will, the group with the most obviously at stake.

When there's no will, the estate doesn't go unclaimed. A default set of rules decides who inherits, and those rules were written for an average family, not yours. In England and Wales, for instance, GOV.UK's intestacy rules set out a fixed order of relatives who share in someone's money and possessions when they die without a will. An unmarried partner isn't among them, however long the relationship lasted. Similar defaults exist in most countries, and what they say varies, so it's worth checking what applies where you live.

The cost isn't only who ends up with what. It's time and friction. Without clear instructions, families spend weeks working out what existed, where it was held, and who was owed a say. Grief and paperwork arrive together. Disagreements that a single page could have prevented harden into the kind that split families.

There's a second gap hiding inside the first, and it's the one this platform was built for. A will typically deals with property and money. It rarely lists your email, your photo library, your password manager, your cloud storage or your social accounts. Those often sit outside the will entirely, locked behind credentials nobody else has. You can have a perfectly valid will and still leave your family unable to reach a single one of your accounts.

The fix is smaller than the surveys make it sound, because the barrier was never difficulty. It was inertia. Writing a will is the obvious first move, and for most people it's a short job rather than the ordeal they've imagined. Getting proper advice matters where an estate is large or a family is complicated, so it's sensible to check what's appropriate for your situation.

A will alone still leaves the digital half of your life unaddressed, which is where an inventory comes in. Make a list of what you actually have: the accounts, the documents, the subscriptions, the wishes you'd want honoured. Then keep it somewhere the right people can reach at the right moment, and nowhere they can reach a day too early.

That second part is what LifeWyn does. It's an encrypted, zero-knowledge vault where you store your accounts, documents, passwords and final wishes, and it releases them to the people you name once a death is verified. Think of it as the companion to a will rather than a replacement: the will settles the estate, the vault makes sure the people you trust can find and reach everything else. Neither works if you keep meaning to get to it. The whole lesson of the surveys is that meaning to isn't the same as doing.