Everything at 18, Nothing Before

If you die without a will and you have children, the intestacy rules decide who inherits — and where your children are the ones who inherit, they receive their share at 18, not a day sooner. In England and Wales the money is held in a statutory trust until each child's eighteenth birthday and then handed over in full. Nothing in that arrangement is designed to be paid out for the years of raising them in between. That is the gap this page is about: what happens to your children's inheritance if you die without a will in the UK, and who actually pays the rent, the uniforms and the childcare while the inheritance sits waiting.

The uncomfortable part is the timing. A five-year-old who inherits under intestacy does not see a penny of it as a five-year-old. The estate is gathered in, debts are paid, and the children's share is locked away for thirteen years — then it arrives, in one sum, on a teenager who has just left school. Meanwhile the household actually raising that child has had thirteen years of costs and no automatic income from the estate to meet them.

So the honest answer to "who pays for them until then" is: whoever takes the children in. The inheritance is for the child's future; it is not a monthly allowance for their upbringing, and the person doing the upbringing has no right to treat it as one.

The short answer: they inherit at 18, and nothing before

When there is no will, the estate passes under a fixed statutory order that the deceased had no hand in setting. If you leave children and no surviving spouse or civil partner, your children take the whole estate between them in equal shares. If you leave both a spouse and children, the estate is split: the survivor takes your personal possessions, a fixed statutory sum set by the government, and half of what remains outright, and the children share the other half.

Whatever the children's share works out to be, it does not go to the children as cash while they are young. It is held for them on what the law calls a statutory trust, and it becomes theirs to take when they turn 18. Until that birthday the money is theirs in name but not in their hands, and it is nobody's monthly budget for shoes, school trips or a roof.

The rule is old and blunt, and it does not bend to the family in front of it. It treats a household with a five-year-old and a household with a seventeen-year-old identically: hold the money, hand it over at 18. The gap between the day you die and that birthday is the problem, and for a young child it is most of a childhood.

What the intestacy rules actually give your children

It helps to separate two things people run together: who inherits, and when they get it. Intestacy answers both, and neither answer is usually what a parent would have chosen.

On who inherits, the order is rigid. A husband, wife or civil partner comes first and, with children, shares the estate as described above. Unmarried partners are simply not in the list — a cohabiting partner of twenty years inherits nothing under intestacy, which is why so many second families are caught out and why we deal with that squeeze separately in cohabiting with children from a previous relationship. After a spouse and children come parents, then siblings, and so on down a statutory ladder. If there is genuinely no one who qualifies, the estate can pass to the Crown, which is the situation set out in no spouse, no children, no will: where the money goes.

On when they get it, the answer for children is the eighteenth birthday and not before. That single fact reshapes everything, because a parent's instinct is to provide a home and an income for the years of raising a child, and intestacy provides a lump sum for the day the child stops being one. The money and the need are pointing in opposite directions in time.

The statutory trust: what trustees can and cannot do before 18

Because a child under 18 cannot legally hold their inheritance, someone has to hold it for them. Under intestacy that job falls to the administrators of the estate, who become the trustees of the statutory trust. They are whoever is entitled to take out the grant — often a surviving parent, or a close relative — and they answer to the law, not to convenience.

Trustees are not powerless in the meantime. The general law gives them discretion to apply trust money for a child's maintenance, education or benefit, and to advance part of the capital early where it is genuinely for that child. In practice that can mean paying towards school costs, or releasing a sum to help with something substantial. But two things limit how far that helps the household.

First, it is a discretion, not a duty. Trustees may say yes, and they may say no, and they have to act for the child's benefit rather than the carer's convenience. Second, it is aimed at the child's own needs, not at reimbursing the person raising them for the ordinary running of a home. A guardian cannot simply invoice the trust each month for their share of the rent and the food bill. So even a well-funded statutory trust does not function as a wage for the household, and the day-to-day cost of raising the child still lands on that household's own income.

There is a related trap where the main asset is the house itself. A minor cannot be registered as the legal owner of property, so if the home is what the children inherit, trustees hold the title and the mortgage keeps falling due in the meantime — a problem we follow through in could my children stay in this house without me?

The ten years nobody funds

This is the heart of it. Picture the household that takes your children in. From the day of the death, that household is paying for a bigger home or the mortgage on the existing one, for heating and food for extra people, for uniforms that are outgrown every year, for the wraparound childcare that lets the carer keep working, for the school trips and the bus fares and the shoes. Those costs start immediately and run for as long as the children are dependent — often a decade or more from a young age.

Against that, the estate offers a locked box that opens on a distant birthday. Child Benefit and means-tested support exist and are worth claiming, but neither is built to carry a mortgage or a private rent, and they do not scale to the actual cost of raising someone else's children in your home. The bereaved household is left to absorb the difference out of its own pocket, in the same period it is dealing with the loss itself.

Where the children end up moving to the surviving parent's home, the money changes what that household can absorb rather than whether the move happens — a point we take up in they'd move in with the parent they see least. Either way, continuity for the children — the same school, the same friends, a carer who can afford to be present — is bought with income, and intestacy provides none.

The delay before anything can be paid out at all makes the early months harder still. Where there is no will, the administrators need a grant of letters of administration before they can gather in and deal with the estate, and that grant is not immediate. Figures published by HM Courts and Tribunals Service show the process routinely runs to months rather than weeks, and the bills do not pause for it.

Source: HM Courts and Tribunals Service, probate management information, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The lump sum that lands at 18

Now run the clock forward to the birthday the whole arrangement is built around. On the day a child turns 18, their share of the statutory trust becomes theirs absolutely, in cash, with no strings and no oversight. If the estate was substantial, that can be a very large sum arriving in the hands of someone who left school weeks earlier.

Most parents, asked directly, do not want a teenager to receive tens of thousands of pounds — sometimes far more — on their eighteenth birthday with no guidance and no structure. Yet that is precisely what intestacy delivers, because 18 is the age the statute fixes and a will is the only way to change it. Dying without a will hands your children both problems at once: no money for the years they are being raised, and all of it at the moment many would handle it least well.

A will can set a later age — 21 or 25 are common — or put the inheritance into a trust with trustees you have chosen and instructions you have written. That does not just protect an eighteen-year-old from a windfall; it lets the money be used sensibly across childhood and into early adulthood, which is what most parents actually intend.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The overall shape is similar across the UK — no will means a statutory order decides everything — but the detail differs, and the age at which children take their inheritance is the clearest example.

In Scotland the rules sit in the Succession (Scotland) Act 1964, and the machinery is different: a surviving spouse or civil partner has "prior rights" in the home and its contents and a cash sum, and children have "legal rights" to a share of the moveable estate that cannot simply be written out. Crucially, the age of legal capacity in Scotland is 16, not 18, so a child can take their inheritance two years earlier. The interaction of prior rights and legal rights is worth understanding on its own terms, and we set it out in dying without a will in Scotland: prior rights explained.

In Northern Ireland the intestacy rules follow their own statute and use different fixed sums from England and Wales, though children there generally take their share at 18 as in England and Wales. Wherever you are, the theme is the same: the state's default was written for the average estate of decades ago, not for your particular children, and only a will replaces it with your intentions.

What actually closes the gap

Two things, working together, turn this from a problem into a plan. Neither is exotic and both can be sorted while you are well.

The first is a will. It is the only document that lets you choose who raises your children, choose your trustees, set the age they inherit, and — if you have a partner you are not married to — leave them anything at all. Without it, every one of those decisions is made for you by a statute that does not know your family. The government's guidance on what happens when someone dies without a will sets out the default order in full, and reading it is usually enough to convince most parents to make one.

The second is putting income where the gap is. Because the shortfall is a monthly one — the cost of running a household that is raising your children — the cover that matches it most closely is one that pays a regular income rather than a single lump sum. Family income benefit is built for exactly this: it pays out month by month for the rest of an agreed term, so a policy taken out while a child is small can replace an income until that child is grown. Written in trust, the payments reach the household directly and quickly, without waiting for letters of administration to be granted.

Whether a claim is paid, and on what terms cover is offered, depends on the usual underwriting rather than on anything that can be promised in advance. If you want to see what that would look like against your own circumstances and the age of your youngest child, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker size it to the years your children would still need providing for. Free, independent guidance on wills and money after a death is also available from MoneyHelper, which is government-backed and does not sell anything.

The wider set of decisions that follow a parent's death — who the children live with, whether they keep their home, and how a second family is provided for — runs through the rest of our guide to dependants and unusual family shapes, and the specific question of leaving for children when you have married later in life is covered in marrying at 60 with children from before.

Frequently asked questions

At what age do children inherit under the intestacy rules?

Eighteen in England and Wales, where their share is held on statutory trusts until then. In Scotland it is sixteen. Trustees can apply money for a child's maintenance, education or benefit before that age, but they are not obliged to, and they are not the person raising the child. Northern Ireland broadly follows the age of eighteen but uses its own fixed sums for the rest of the split.

Who pays for the children in the meantime?

Whoever is raising them. Trustees may release money for a child's benefit, but the day-to-day cost of housing, feeding and clothing falls on the carer's household, potentially for more than a decade. Child Benefit and means-tested support help, but neither covers a mortgage or a private rent, and the estate provides no automatic income for the person doing the raising.

How do I avoid a lump sum landing at eighteen?

Make a will. It can set a later age, such as 21 or 25, or use a discretionary trust with trustees you choose. A life policy written in trust does the same for the payout and reaches the household quickly, without waiting for the estate to be administered. Together, a will and cover written in trust replace both problems — the empty years and the sudden windfall — with a plan you control.