Getting Married Cancels the Will That Names Your Guardians

Here is what happens to your will when you get married in England and Wales: it is revoked. Not amended, not partly overridden — cancelled in full, as though you had never made it. The gifts, the executors, the trusts you set up for your children and, the part that hits parents hardest, the guardian you appointed all fall away on the day of the wedding. Unless the will was drafted specifically in expectation of that marriage, you leave the register office without a valid will.

The rule is old and blunt. Under the Wills Act 1837, a person's will is revoked by their marriage. It does not matter that the will still reflects your wishes, that your new spouse is the main beneficiary anyway, or that you had no idea the wedding touched it. The law treats the marriage as wiping the slate, and the same applies to registering a civil partnership. This is the quiet trap the confetti hides: a couple who marry believing they are more protected than ever can be less protected than they were the week before.

For a parent, the sharpest edge is guardianship. The appointment of a guardian for your children is almost always made inside the will, and when the will goes, the appointment goes with it. A newly married parent can therefore be, without knowing it, a parent of young children with no valid will and no appointed guardian at all.

The rule, in one line: marriage revokes the will

Section 18 of the Wills Act 1837 does one thing very cleanly. It provides that a will is revoked by the testator's marriage, subject to narrow exceptions. There is no partial version, no sliding scale, no grandfather clause for wills that happen to still make sense. The moment the marriage is registered, the earlier will has no legal effect.

You can read the Act itself on the government's legislation site, and it is worth doing, because the wording is shorter and starker than most people expect. The Wills Act 1837 sets out the whole of the revocation rule for England and Wales. The same principle was carried over to civil partnerships when they were created, so forming a civil partnership revokes an earlier will in exactly the same way.

What goes when the will goes

Because revocation is total, it is worth being concrete about what a newly married parent actually loses. The will named executors — the people who would gather your estate, pay debts and carry out your wishes. Gone. It left specific gifts and the residue to particular people. Gone. It may have held your children's inheritance in trust until they were older, protecting them from receiving a large sum at eighteen. Gone. And it appointed a guardian to raise them if you died. Gone.

The guardian point deserves its own line because it is the one people find hardest to believe. You chose that person deliberately, probably after long thought and a difficult conversation. Marriage erases the appointment as surely as it erases a cash gift. If you die after the wedding without having redone anything, no one has been legally appointed to raise your children, and the question of who does is left to be sorted out afterwards — which is exactly the uncertainty naming a guardian was meant to remove.

There is a knock-on effect people rarely think through. Because the whole will is gone, so is every fallback you built into it — the reserve executor, the second-choice guardian, the trust that would have protected a vulnerable beneficiary. Marriage does not just remove your first choices; it removes the backups you carefully put behind them, leaving nothing at all where a layered plan used to be. A parent who had thought through what happens if the first guardian could not serve loses that second answer too.

The silent intestacy nobody warns you about

With the will revoked and no new one made, you die intestate, and the intestacy rules decide who gets what. For many newly married couples the headline outcome sounds fine: a surviving spouse inherits a great deal. But "sounds fine" hides two problems.

The first is that intestacy is a fixed formula, not your wishes. Where there are children, a surviving spouse in England and Wales takes the personal possessions, a statutory legacy of £322,000, and half of whatever remains, with the children sharing the other half. If your estate is larger than that, or your family is not the standard shape the formula assumes — stepchildren, children from an earlier relationship, an arrangement that has only just become a marriage — the result can be very far from what you would have written.

Source: gov.uk, Inheritance — rules when there is no will (statutory legacy of £322,000 for deaths on or after 26 July 2023).

The second problem is the children's money and the children themselves. A share passing to a child under intestacy is held for them only until eighteen, when they receive it outright — there is no trust to hold it back, because the trust you wrote died with the will. And no guardian stands appointed. A parent who would never have handed a teenager a lump sum at eighteen, and who had carefully chosen who should raise them, has silently undone both by getting married and not knowing this rule.

If you want to see how differently the money can behave depending on structure, our explanation of why money held in trust reaches children before probate does shows what the revoked trust would have achieved — and what its absence costs.

The one exception: a will made in contemplation of marriage

There is a way to make a will that survives the wedding. If the will is made in expectation of a specific marriage to a specific person, and says so in the right terms, the revocation rule does not apply when that marriage takes place. This is usually called a contemplation of marriage clause.

Two things matter about it. It has to point at the marriage you actually go on to have — a clause expecting your marriage to one person does not protect the will if you marry someone else. And it has to be drafted deliberately; you cannot rely on a passing mention of a partner. The practical upshot is simple: if you are making or updating a will and a wedding is on the horizon, tell whoever drafts it, so the clause can be included and the will does not evaporate on the day.

If there is no such clause, the fix is equally simple and just as important — make a new will after the marriage. A will made after the wedding is not touched by that wedding, and it restores everything the marriage removed: executors, trusts, and the guardian appointment.

A guardian can be appointed outside the will

There is a second route to protecting the guardian appointment specifically, and it is not widely known. Under section 5 of the Children Act 1989, a parent with parental responsibility can appoint a guardian in a separate document — one that is signed and dated by the parent — rather than inside the will. Because it is not part of the will, marriage does not revoke it.

That does not mean you should keep guardianship out of your will. It means that a standalone, signed and dated appointment is a useful belt-and-braces step, particularly in the window around a wedding or any time your will might be in flux. Almost everyone makes the appointment inside the will and loses it along with everything else; a separate signed appointment is cheap insurance against exactly the trap this page describes. It is also worth thinking about your fallback — who takes the children if your first-choice guardian cannot serve — which we cover in what happens if the guardian you named dies first.

Cohabiting, then marrying: the trap that catches parents twice

Unmarried couples with children are often the very people who did make a will, precisely because they know the intestacy rules do not recognise a cohabiting partner and would leave them nothing. That will is doing important work: it provides for the partner, sets up a trust for the children and names a guardian. Then the couple marry — the natural next step — and the wedding revokes the very will that was protecting all of them.

Marriage at least means the intestacy rules now recognise the survivor as a spouse, so the partner is no longer shut out entirely. But the children's trust is gone, the guardian appointment is gone, and any provision that departed from the rigid intestacy split is gone with them. A couple can move from "carefully protected" to "protected only by the default formula" on their wedding day, and feel more secure while being less so. Making a fresh will straight after the ceremony is what closes the gap, and it is the one piece of admin worth doing before the thank-you cards.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The revocation rule is not UK-wide, and this is where people who have moved, or who marry across a border, get caught. In Scotland, marriage does not automatically revoke a will. A Scottish will made before the wedding generally stands — although a new spouse and any children have their own claims on the estate under Scots law, so the will surviving does not mean the marriage changes nothing. We set that out in our note on why marriage does not revoke a Scottish will but legal rights still bite.

Northern Ireland follows the same principle as England and Wales: marriage revokes an earlier will under its own wills legislation, subject to a contemplation exception. So a couple marrying in Belfast face the revocation trap; a couple marrying in Glasgow do not. If you made your will in one part of the UK and married or now live in another, have it checked under the law that actually applies to you — the differences are covered in our guide on whether an English will is still valid in Scotland.

What to do before and after the wedding

The action here is short and worth doing before anything else on the wedding admin list. If you already have a will and a wedding is coming, either add a contemplation of marriage clause now or diarise a new will for immediately after. If you have already married and did nothing, treat a new will as urgent, especially if you have children — because until it is signed you are intestate and your children have no appointed guardian.

While you are reviewing the will, review the cover that funds it. A guardian raising your children needs money as well as authority, and the payout that provides it should be pointed at a trust rather than swept into an estate that marriage has just thrown into intestacy. If your arrangements have changed — new spouse, new home, new children — it is a sensible moment to get life insurance quotes and check the amount and the beneficiaries still match the family you now have. Marrying later in life with children from before raises its own questions, which we address in marrying at sixty with children from an earlier relationship, and the wider picture is in our guide to wills, guardianship and children.

Frequently asked questions

Does getting married cancel my will?

Yes. In England and Wales, marriage revokes an existing will unless it was made in expectation of that particular marriage. Everything goes with it — the executors, the trusts for your children and the guardian appointment — and until you make a new will the intestacy rules apply in the meantime.

Does my guardian appointment survive the marriage?

Not if it was contained in the revoked will, which is where almost everyone puts it. A guardian can also be appointed in a separate signed and dated document under the Children Act 1989, and marriage does not affect that. But if the only appointment is inside your will, you lose it along with the rest.

Is the rule the same across the UK?

No. Marriage revokes a will in England and Wales and in Northern Ireland, but not in Scotland, where a pre-wedding will generally stands although a new spouse or child may still have claims. If you have married or moved across a border, have the will checked under the law that applies where you now live.