Married in Scotland: Your Will Stands, Legal Rights Bite

No. Getting married in Scotland does not revoke your will. The rule that a wedding automatically cancels an existing will is an English one, written into the Wills Act 1837, and it has never applied north of the border. If you made a Scottish will last year and marry next month, that will is still valid the morning after the wedding, word for word as you left it.

This matters because the internet does not sort its answers by nation. Search whether getting married revokes your will and almost everything that ranks describes England and Wales, where the answer is yes. A Scottish reader can come away certain their will has been wiped out when it has not — or, just as risky, reassured that the marriage has quietly tidied up their affairs when Scots law does no such thing and leaves the whole job to them.

So the position in Scotland is the near-opposite of the English one. The will survives the wedding, which is convenient only if it still says what you now want it to say. And whatever the will says, Scots law reserves a fixed share of part of your estate for your spouse and your children through a mechanism called legal rights, which no will can simply write out.

The short answer: your Scottish will stands

Scotland has its own law of succession, separate from the rest of the United Kingdom, and it does not contain the provision that catches people elsewhere. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, section 18 of the Wills Act 1837 says that marriage revokes an earlier will unless the will was made specifically in expectation of that marriage. Scotland never adopted that rule. Marriage there is not treated as an event that cancels what you wrote before.

The everyday consequence is easy to miss. A will you made while single, or while married to someone else, does not lapse when you remarry. It stays in force, still naming whoever it named, still leaving what it left. If that document predates the person you have just married, they may not appear in it at all — and the will being valid is precisely the problem, because it will be carried out as written.

That is the trap. In England, a forgotten old will is at least swept away by the wedding, forcing the couple back to the intestacy rules or a fresh start. In Scotland the forgotten old will simply keeps going. If you want your new spouse to inherit under it, you have to say so, and the wedding does not say it for you.

Where the "marriage cancels your will" rule actually comes from

The idea that a wedding tears up your will is real, but it is a rule of English law and the two nations that follow it. If you have read that marriage revokes a will and are worried, you were almost certainly reading about England and Wales. We set out that side of it, and the specific problem it causes for parents, in our note on how getting married cancels the will that names your guardians — a difficulty that does not arise in the same way in Scotland precisely because the will survives.

Because this confusion is so common among Scottish searchers, it is worth being blunt about it in its own right, which we do in does marriage revoke a will in Scotland. The one-line version is the one above: it does not. But knowing the will survives is only half of what a newly married person in Scotland needs to understand, because a valid will does not give you a free hand over your whole estate.

Legal rights: the share you cannot write out

Scots law protects close family from being cut out entirely. It does this through legal rights, an entitlement that exists automatically on death and cannot be defeated by the terms of a will. A surviving spouse or civil partner has a legal right, and so do the children, and these claims bite on the estate regardless of what the will directs.

The shares are fixed. Where you leave both a spouse and children, the spouse can claim one third of the moveable estate and the children one third between them, sharing that third equally. The remaining third, known as the dead's part, is the portion you are genuinely free to leave as you please. Where you leave a spouse but no children, the spouse's share rises to one half; where there are children but no surviving spouse, the children share one half between them. These are not amounts a court decides case by case — they are set fractions, and a family member entitled to them can insist on their share.

The reason this surprises people is that they assume a valid will is the final word. In England and Wales it very nearly is, subject only to a claim under family provision legislation that a court has to be persuaded to allow. In Scotland the protection is built into the arithmetic of the estate and needs no court's permission. A child you had hoped to leave nothing can still claim their legitim. This is the point that most often has to be corrected after an English-focused article has been read, and we cover it in full in legal rights in Scotland, where children can claim against a will.

What legal rights do not touch

There is one large limit on legal rights, and understanding it changes how the whole picture looks. Legal rights apply only to the moveable estate. That means money, bank and building society accounts, shares and investments, vehicles, and personal possessions — broadly, everything you own except land and buildings.

Land and buildings are heritable property, and they fall outside legal rights altogether. The family home, in particular, is usually the most valuable thing a person owns and is heritable, so it is not part of the pot from which a spouse or child can claim a fixed share. If most of your wealth is tied up in the house, the moveable estate that legal rights attach to may be modest, and the claims correspondingly smaller than the headline fractions suggest.

That split has practical consequences for a couple. How the house is owned matters enormously, and Scottish titles are often set up with a survivorship destination that passes a deceased owner's share directly to the survivor, sitting outside the will entirely. Two things follow. The home may pass to your new spouse automatically and cleanly, while the moveable estate — the savings and investments — is where legal rights and the will do their work. Getting both parts to line up with your intentions is the job the wedding does not do for you.

A child born after the will was made

Marriage in later life, or a second relationship, often comes with the prospect of more children, and Scots law has a specific doctrine here. A birth does not revoke a will any more than a marriage does. But a child born after the will was signed can challenge it, on the long-standing presumption that a parent who had thought about it would have made provision for that child and simply failed to update the document before dying.

This is a challenge that has to be raised and argued after your death, by or on behalf of the child, at exactly the moment a grieving family is least equipped to have that argument. The way to avoid leaving it hanging is unglamorous and completely within your control: review the will after any birth, just as you should after a marriage. A will reviewed and re-signed to reflect the family as it actually is removes the entire question.

The same reasoning applies when you blend two families. If either of you brings children from before, the interaction between a new spouse, legal rights, and your own children needs to be thought through rather than assumed. Couples marrying later on face this squarely, and the money side of it is set out in our guide to marrying at sixty with children from before.

What this means in practice, and where cover fits

Put the pieces together and the to-do list for a newly married person in Scotland is short but real. The old will is still live, so read it and decide whether it still reflects what you want. Remember that legal rights will give your spouse and children a fixed share of the moveable estate whatever you write, so plan around them rather than pretending they are not there. And check how the house is titled, because heritable property behaves differently from everything else.

Life cover has a particular use in this setting that is worth understanding. A policy written in trust does not form part of your estate at all. Because it sits outside the estate, it is outside the reach of legal rights, and it pays the person you name directly rather than being divided up by the fixed fractions. That makes it one of the cleaner ways to make sure a specific person — a new spouse, or a child from an earlier relationship — receives a defined sum you have chosen, without it being reshaped by the succession rules. Whether an insurer offers cover, and on what terms, depends on your age and health and is settled through underwriting, so it is not something to leave until a diagnosis makes it harder.

If you want to see what that would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker set the sum and the structure against your own circumstances. It is also worth reading how these same questions play out for couples across the rest of the cluster of life events in our hub on life events that change who depends on you, and where the survivor's freedom to change things later comes up, in how mirror wills can be rewritten after you die.

Scotland compared with the rest of the UK

To keep the differences straight: in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, marriage revokes an earlier will unless it was made in contemplation of that marriage, and close family have no fixed share — a disappointed relative must bring a court claim to be provided for. In Scotland, marriage leaves the will standing, but legal rights hand a surviving spouse and children a guaranteed slice of the moveable estate that the will cannot remove.

Neither system is simply more generous than the other; they protect family in different ways and at different stages. What matters is not being caught out by applying one nation's rule to the other nation's estate. If you married in Scotland, or you live and hold your assets in Scotland, the Scottish rules are the ones that will govern what happens, whatever an England-focused article told you. The Scottish Government's public information service, mygov.scot, sets out the succession position and points to where to get a will drawn up or reviewed.

Frequently asked questions

Does getting married revoke a will in Scotland?

No. The Wills Act 1837 rule that marriage revokes a will applies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, not in Scotland. A Scottish will made before the wedding remains valid afterwards, which is only convenient if it still says what you now want it to say. If it predates your new spouse, it will be carried out as written, so it is worth reviewing rather than assuming the marriage has updated it.

What are legal rights, and can I write them out of my will?

You cannot. Legal rights entitle a surviving spouse or civil partner, and children, to a fixed share of the moveable estate, meaning everything other than land and buildings. A spouse claims one third where there are children, and the children claim one third between them where a spouse survives, leaving one third — the dead's part — that you are free to leave as you choose. The claims arise automatically and need no court order.

Does having a child change a Scottish will?

A birth does not revoke a will, but Scots law allows a child born after the will was made to challenge it, on the basis that the parent would have provided for them had they turned their mind to it. Reviewing and re-signing the will after a birth avoids leaving that argument to be had by others after your death, at the worst possible time.