What Happens If You Die Without a Will in Washington

The short version

If you die “intestate,” or without a will, in Washington, you have not avoided having an estate plan. You have accepted the one the Legislature wrote, in Chapter 11.04 of the Revised Code of Washington. It is a rigid formula. It does not know your family, it does not know what you promised anyone, and it cannot be argued with after the fact.

For some families that default lands close enough to what you would have chosen. For many, it does not. The gap is widest for unmarried couples, blended families, parents of minor children, and anyone who has been through a divorce.

Start here: a will may not control most of what you own

This is the part that catches almost everyone, so it is worth taking first. A number of assets pass by contract — not by will, and not by the intestacy statute. Whoever is named on the account gets it, even if your will, or the law, says something different:

• Beneficiary designations — life insurance, retirement accounts, IRAs, 401(k)s, HSAs, annuities
• Jointly held property — real estate, bank accounts, or vehicles titled with a right of survivorship
• POD / TOD accounts — payable-on-death and transfer-on-death accounts
• Trust assets — property already titled in a living trust
• Community property agreements — a Washington community property agreement can vest everything in the surviving spouse automatically

For a lot of households, that list is the majority of the balance sheet. Which means the single most common estate planning failure we see is not the absence of a will at all. It is a beneficiary form that nobody has looked at in fifteen years.

Washington is a community property state

Before the statute can divide anything, it has to sort your property into two buckets, because they are treated differently.

Community property

Generally, what either spouse acquired during the marriage — including wages earned during the marriage and what was bought with them. Each spouse owns half. You can only pass your half.

Separate property

Generally, what you owned before the marriage or acquired after separation, plus anything you received during it by gift or inheritance — as long as it was kept separate and not mixed in with community funds.

That last clause does a lot of work. Separate property that has been deposited into a joint account, used to pay a shared mortgage, or improved with community earnings can become difficult to trace — and the burden of proving it is separate falls on whoever is claiming it, at a point when the person who knew the history is gone.

Who inherits, and how much

If you are survived by a spouse or a state registered domestic partner, RCW 11.04.015 gives them your entire half of the community property. The separate property is where it gets interesting:

If there is no surviving spouse or registered domestic partner

The estate passes down a fixed ladder, and it stops at the first rung where someone is standing:

• your children and their descendants; then, if none —
• your parents; then, if none —
• your siblings and their descendants; then, if none —
• your grandparents; then, if none —
• the descendants of your grandparents — which reaches your aunts and uncles, your first cousins, and their children

And there the ladder stops. Washington cuts intestate inheritance off strictly at the issue of your grandparents. A relative who connects to you only through a great-grandparent — a great-aunt, a second cousin — is outside the statute and cannot inherit, however close you actually were and however easy they are to find.

Only if that ladder is empty does the estate go to the State of Washington. That outcome is genuinely rare — which is worth saying plainly, because “the state takes everything” is the most repeated myth in this area. The real risk is not that the state takes your estate. It is that the statute hands it to the right relatives in the wrong proportions, at the wrong time, with no one you chose in charge of it.

Five risks of not having an estate plan

1. You will have no say in who raises your minor children

Washington law lets a parent nominate a guardian in a will. Without one, there is no nomination for the court to weigh — a judge decides, based on the record in front of them, and relatives who disagree can each file competing petitions. Your children's living arrangements become a contested motion at the precise moment they can least absorb one.

2. Your unmarried partner may inherit nothing

Washington abolished common law marriage. A partner of thirty years who is not a spouse or a registered domestic partner is not an heir under the intestacy statute and inherits nothing from it. Washington courts do recognize a committed intimate relationship, but that is an equitable doctrine used to divide property the couple accumulated together — it is not a seat at the intestacy table, it has to be proven, and proving it means litigating against your family while grieving you.

3. Your stepchildren will inherit nothing

A stepchild you raised but never legally adopted takes nothing under the ordinary rules of intestate succession. A biological child you have not spoken to in twenty years takes a full share. The statute counts legal relationships, not real ones. In a blended family this is usually the single largest gap between what the law does and what the parent actually wanted.

There is one narrow exception, and it is not a plan. RCW 11.04.095 rescues stepchildren in a single specific situation: where property passed from a biological parent to a stepparent, the stepparent later dies intestate, and there are no blood heirs at all. That property goes to the stepchildren rather than escheating to the state. It is a backstop against escheat — it depends on facts you cannot control and on there being no other relatives anywhere on the ladder. If you want a stepchild provided for, name them.

4. Your children will receive everything at eighteen, outright

There is no default trust and no default age condition. An eighteen-year-old heir receives their entire share outright, on their birthday, in a lump sum, with no limitations or conditions. A will or a trust can stage that over time, hold it for education, or keep it in the hands of someone you trust until the beneficiary is ready. Intestacy has exactly one setting.

5. No tax or creditor planning will happen

Washington imposes its own estate tax, entirely separate from the federal estate tax, and Washington's exclusion amount is $3 million as of August 2026, compared to the federal exemption of $15 million for individuals and $30 million for married couples.

Many Washington families sit comfortably under the federal exemption amount but over the Washington exclusion threshold. And the figure that matters is the gross estate: the house at current market value, retirement accounts, business interests, and the death benefit of life insurance you own, all counted together. A paid-off home in Kitsap County plus a retirement account plus a policy adds up faster than most people expect.

There is planning that addresses this, and Washington's exclusion is not portable between spouses the way the federal exclusion is — which means a married couple can lose one spouse's entire exclusion by doing nothing. None of it happens by default.

It does not only decide who receives — it decides who is in charge

This is the half of intestacy people never think about. The statute does not just distribute your property. It also determines who holds the authority to gather it, sell it, pay your debts, deal with the IRS, and hand out what is left. Washington runs a strict priority sequence for who has the right to be appointed administrator:

• Your surviving spouse or registered domestic partner — or the person they nominate
• Then your next of kin — adult children, then parents, then siblings
• Then principal creditors — or an administrator the court appoints, if the family does not step forward

Read that last line again. If no relative takes the job, the person running your estate can end up being someone whose interest in it is getting paid. Nothing about that is improper — it is simply what the statute does when the people who should be in charge are unavailable, unwilling, or fighting.

A will replaces this entire sequence with one sentence naming the person you actually trust. That is often the most valuable line in the document, and it has nothing to do with money.

And it usually costs your family more

Dying intestate rarely avoids probate. It tends to make probate slower and more expensive:

• Because no one is named to serve, appointment runs through the priority sequence above — and where two relatives of equal priority both want the job, that becomes its own contested proceeding before the estate has accomplished anything.
• A will can waive the bond requirement. Without one, the estate may have to buy a bond, and the estate pays that premium.
• Washington's nonintervention probate is one of the most efficient in the country, and a will can grant those powers outright. Without a will they still remain available — under RCW 11.68.011 they are presumed to be in the beneficiaries' best interest where the estate is solvent and the administrator is not a creditor — but they now arrive by presumption rather than by your direction. Heirs must be given notice, and any one of them can appear and try to rebut it. A will removes that opening entirely.

The bill for all of that is paid out of the estate. Which is to say: by the people you were trying to provide for.

What to actually do about it

You do not need to solve everything this month. In order of how much protection you get per hour spent:

• Examine your beneficiary designations for every retirement account, life insurance policy, and POD/TOD account, and confirm the primary and contingent beneficiaries are actually who you want to inherit the asset. This is free and it overrides everything else.
• Compile a list of your assets and how they are titled, including real property, accounts, business interests, digital assets and debts.
• If you have minor children, select a guardian who would raise them in the event of your death. It is the question that most often turns a someday project into a this-month project.
• Talk to an estate planning attorney about whether your particular situation would be best suited to a will based or trust based estate plan.