Types of Wills in the UK: Single, Mirror, Trust & Living Wills

At a glance

• Core formality rule: a will must be in writing, signed by the person making it, and witnessed by two people present at the same time — section 9 of the Wills Act 1837.
• Single will: covers one person's estate only; the simplest structure and the right starting point for most people without a partner or complex family situation.
• Mirror wills: two separate, near-identical wills for a couple, usually leaving everything to each other and then to shared beneficiaries. Not binding on the survivor — either partner can change theirs at any time, including after the first death.
• Will with a trust: gives named trustees (often the same people as your executors) control over how and when a beneficiary receives their inheritance, rather than an outright gift. Useful for young beneficiaries, vulnerable or disabled beneficiaries, and blended families.
• Living will (advance decision): governed by the Mental Capacity Act 2005, this deals only with refusing specific medical treatment if you later lack capacity. It is not a will in the inheritance sense and doesn't touch your money or property.
• Marriage generally revokes an earlier will (Wills Act 1837, s.18); divorce or dissolution cancels gifts and appointments to a former spouse or civil partner, treating them as having died on the date the divorce is finalised (s.18A).
• No valid will = intestacy: the Administration of Estates Act 1925 decides who inherits, in a fixed order that does not include unmarried partners or unadopted stepchildren.
• Electronic wills are not yet legally valid in England and Wales — the Law Commission recommended reform in May 2025, but as at this review it had not been enacted; a will must still be signed on paper and witnessed in person.

This is legal information, not legal advice. It explains the general position for wills in England and Wales and does not take account of your specific circumstances. Reading it does not create a solicitor–client relationship. LegalDocuments.co.uk is not a law firm and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. For advice on your own situation, speak to our telephone legal advice service or consult a regulated solicitor.

What counts as a "type" of will

A will is a legal document that sets out what should happen to your estate — money, property, possessions and increasingly digital assets — after you die. In England and Wales, the core validity rules sit in the Wills Act 1837. Section 9 sets out the formalities: the will must be in writing, signed by the person making it (the testator) or by someone else in their presence and at their direction, and that signature must be made or acknowledged in the presence of two witnesses who are both present at the same time. Each witness then signs in the testator's presence. Miss any part of this and the will can fail entirely, however clear the intention behind it.

This guide covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own rules on wills and succession, and some of what follows — particularly the intestacy rules — does not apply if you are domiciled or hold assets there.

Within the section 9 framework, "type of will" isn't a formal legal category so much as a description of structure and purpose. The main patterns you'll come across are:

• a single will, covering one person;
• mirror wills, a matching (but legally separate) pair for a couple;
• a will containing a trust, used to control how and when a beneficiary receives something rather than handing it over outright; and
• a living will, which deals with medical treatment, not money, and sits outside the Wills Act framework entirely.

Choosing between them is a question of what problem you're actually trying to solve — not which is "better" in the abstract.

Single wills

A single will is made by one person and reflects only their wishes. It's the right starting point for most people: someone without a partner, someone whose partner already has separate arrangements, or a couple who — for whatever reason — don't want their wishes bound together in near-identical documents.

A single will still needs to name executors (the people who administer the estate), decide who inherits what, and, for parents of children under 18, appoint guardians. It can include a trust (see below) even though it's made by one person. The "single" in single will refers to how many people made it, not how simple its provisions are.

Mirror wills

Mirror wills are two separate legal documents made by a couple — usually spouses, civil partners, or long-term cohabitees — that mirror each other's terms. The typical pattern is: everything to my partner if they survive me, and if they don't, to our children (or another shared set of beneficiaries) in agreed shares.

The point people most often miss: each mirror will is legally independent of the other. Making mirror wills does not bind either partner to keep their will unchanged after the first death. Once the first partner dies, the survivor is free to make an entirely new will — including cutting out children, adding a new partner, or changing the shares — and the fact that mirror wills were once made together has no legal effect on that freedom. If you want your wishes to bind the survivor, you need a different structure entirely (commonly a trust that locks in an interest for children while giving the survivor rights to use the assets during their lifetime), not a mirror will.

Mirror wills tend to work well where a couple has a straightforward, aligned family situation — most commonly, a couple with only children they have together. Where there are children from an earlier relationship, a second marriage, or assets one partner wants ring-fenced, mirror wills alone can leave gaps that a trust-based will is better placed to close.

Wills containing a trust

A trust within a will (sometimes called a "will trust") separates ownership from control. Instead of a beneficiary receiving their inheritance outright the moment probate is granted, the assets are held by trustees (often the same people as your executors) who manage them according to rules you set out, releasing money or property to the beneficiary when and how you specify.

This is commonly used to:

• Protect a young beneficiary — for example, holding an inheritance until a child or grandchild reaches a chosen age, rather than 18.
• Protect a vulnerable or disabled beneficiary — a trust can preserve eligibility for means-tested benefits in a way an outright gift might not; GOV.UK's guidance on trusts for vulnerable people explains the tax treatment that applies to these arrangements.
• Provide for a blended family — for example, giving a surviving spouse the right to live in the family home for their lifetime, with the property passing to the testator's own children afterwards, rather than risking it passing entirely to the survivor's side of the family.
• Ring-fence assets from a beneficiary's future divorce or creditors — because the beneficiary doesn't own the trust assets outright, they generally sit outside their own matrimonial or bankruptcy estate (this depends heavily on the drafting and the specific facts, and is an area where poor wording is a common source of disputes).

Not everyone needs one. A trust adds cost, complexity, and an ongoing administrative burden on the trustees (including possible tax reporting). Whether the benefits outweigh that depends on your family, your assets and what you're actually trying to achieve — this is a case where getting professional drafting advice is usually worth it, because badly worded trust provisions are a common cause of expensive post-death disputes.

Living wills (advance decisions) — not really a "will" at all

A living will is the everyday name for an advance decision to refuse treatment, a distinct legal mechanism created by the Mental Capacity Act 2005. It lets you specify, in advance, medical treatments you want to refuse if you later lose the mental capacity to make or communicate that decision yourself — for example, specific forms of resuscitation, ventilation, or artificial nutrition and hydration.

An advance decision:

• deals only with medical treatment, never money, property or who inherits what;
• only takes effect if you later lack capacity to make the decision yourself at the relevant time (section 25 sets out when a decision is "valid and applicable");
• must be in writing and signed, with a witness, and must include an explicit statement that it applies even if life is at risk, if you want it to cover refusal of life-sustaining treatment (section 25(5)–(6)).

An advance decision is a different document from a lasting power of attorney (LPA) for health and welfare, which appoints someone to make health and care decisions on your behalf rather than setting out your own refusals in advance. GOV.UK's guidance on health and welfare attorneys explains how the two interact: if you make a valid, applicable advance decision after appointing an attorney, the advance decision generally takes priority for the treatment it covers; if your LPA is made after the advance decision and gives the attorney authority over the same treatment, the LPA can instead override it. Many people use both, alongside a conventional will, as part of a wider plan for later life.

What happens without a valid will (intestacy)

If you die without a valid will, you're said to have died intestate, and the Administration of Estates Act 1925 (as amended, most significantly by the Inheritance and Trustees' Powers Act 2014) sets out a fixed order of who inherits. GOV.UK's guide to who can inherit if there's no will sets out the current rules in detail. In broad outline:

• A spouse or civil partner with children does not automatically inherit everything. They receive personal possessions, a fixed "statutory legacy" (raised to £322,000 for deaths on or after 26 July 2023 by statutory instrument — check GOV.UK for the current figure, as it is reviewed periodically against inflation), and half of anything left over; the children inherit the other half between them.
• A spouse or civil partner with no children inherits the whole estate.
• Children with no surviving spouse or civil partner inherit the whole estate between them.
• With no spouse, civil partner or children, the estate passes to other relatives in a strict order (parents, then siblings, and so on), and ultimately to the Crown as bona vacantia if no qualifying relative can be found.

Critically, these rules do not recognise unmarried partners (however long the relationship) or stepchildren who haven't been legally adopted. Close friends and unmarried partners inherit nothing under intestacy, regardless of how the family actually lived. This mismatch between what people assume and what the law actually provides is one of the most common reasons people decide to make a will in the first place.

How marriage and divorce affect a will you already have

Two life events change an existing will automatically, without you doing anything:

Marriage. Under section 18 of the Wills Act 1837, getting married generally revokes — cancels — any will you made before the wedding. The main exception is where the will itself states that it was made in expectation of marrying a specific person and is not to be revoked by that marriage. If you're planning to marry and want your existing will to survive the wedding, this wording needs to be in the will before you marry, not after.

Divorce or dissolution. Under section 18A, divorce or the dissolution of a civil partnership does not revoke the whole will. Instead, your former spouse or civil partner is treated, for the purposes of your will, as if they had died on the date the divorce or dissolution became final. Any gift to them fails (subject to any substitute gift you named), and any appointment of them as executor or trustee falls away. If your will left everything to your former spouse with no other beneficiaries named, the result can be a partial intestacy for that share, distributed under the Administration of Estates Act 1925 rules above.

Neither rule applies until the relevant event happens — separation alone, without a marriage, decree absolute or final dissolution order, changes nothing about an existing will. Either event is a strong prompt to review your will rather than wait for the next scheduled check.

Reform watch: electronic wills are not yet law

Wills law in this area has stayed largely unchanged since 1837, but that may be about to shift. In May 2025 the Law Commission published its final report recommending that electronic wills be recognised, subject to safeguards, and that remote witnessing by video link be permitted on a permanent basis (a temporary version of remote witnessing was allowed during the Covid-19 pandemic and has since expired). These recommendations would require new primary legislation.

As at this review, that legislation had not been passed, and the section 9 requirements — a physical document, signed and witnessed in person — remain the current law. Treat any claim that electronic or remotely-witnessed wills are already valid in England and Wales with caution, and check GOV.UK and legislation.gov.uk for the current position before relying on it.

Worked example: choosing between the structures

Consider a fictional couple, Priya and Tom. They are both on their second marriage, each with an adult child from a previous relationship, and they jointly own the house they live in.

If they made simple mirror wills leaving everything to each other and then to "our children" in equal shares, the wording would be ambiguous (do "our children" mean all four children, combined, or only children born to the marriage?) and, more importantly, would leave the survivor's remarriage or later change of will entirely unconstrained — the first partner to die has no way of guaranteeing their own child eventually inherits anything.

A will containing a trust addresses this directly: each partner's will can give the survivor a right to continue living in the house for their lifetime (or until remarriage, or another trigger), with the property itself passing on the survivor's death to be split between all four children, or however the couple agree. This is a common and well-established use of a trust in a will precisely because mirror wills, on their own, cannot bind a surviving spouse's future decisions.

Common mistakes when choosing a type of will

• Assuming mirror wills bind the survivor. They don't. If binding the survivor's future decisions matters to you, you need a trust structure, not a mirror will.
• Confusing a living will with an ordinary will. An advance decision deals only with medical treatment; it has no effect on who inherits your estate.
• Not updating a will after marriage. A pre-marriage will is usually revoked by the wedding unless it was drafted with the marriage specifically in mind.
• Assuming a long-term partner inherits automatically. Unmarried partners have no automatic right to inherit under the intestacy rules, however long the relationship.
• Treating a homemade will as risk-free. It can be entirely valid under section 9, but ambiguous wording or a badly drafted trust clause is a common and expensive source of disputes after death.
• Waiting for a "round number" birthday to review a will. Marriage, divorce, a new child, and moving house are the events that actually change what a will needs to say — not the calendar.

What to do next

1. Take stock of what you own, including jointly held assets, which often pass outside your will by survivorship rather than under its terms.
2. Think about who depends on you and whether a straightforward single or mirror will covers everyone fairly, or whether a blended family, a vulnerable beneficiary, or a young child points towards a trust.
3. Decide whether control matters more than simplicity. An outright gift is quick and clean; a trust gives your executors more flexibility over timing and conditions, at the cost of extra complexity.
4. Keep medical wishes separate from financial wishes. If you want a living will, treat the advance decision as a distinct document alongside your conventional will, and consider a lasting power of attorney for health and welfare too.
5. Get the formalities right and store the will safely. The section 9 signing and witnessing rules must be followed exactly, or the will can fail. Tell your executors where the signed original is kept.
6. Review after any major life event — marriage, divorce, a new child, a house purchase, or the death of a beneficiary or executor — rather than waiting for a fixed interval to pass.

This guide provides general information about the main types of will used in England and Wales. It is not legal advice and is not a substitute for advice tailored to your specific circumstances. The law described was accurate as at July 2026 and is subject to change — always check GOV.UK and legislation.gov.uk for the most current position.

Last reviewed: July 2026 by a non-practising solicitor · Next review due: July 2027 or on legislative change.