If you die without a will, leaving a husband or wife and children, the law hands your spouse a fixed sum off the top of your estate before the children get anything. That sum is the statutory legacy, and in England and Wales it has been £322,000 since 26 July 2023. The question this page answers is a blunt one: is the statutory legacy enough to keep the family home? Increasingly, in large parts of the country, the answer is no — because the legacy is a frozen number and house prices are not.
Here is why it matters. The £322,000 is not a floor that protects the house. It is a ceiling on how much of your estate your spouse takes outright before it has to be shared with your children. Where the family home is worth more than the legacy stretches to cover, your surviving spouse can end up owning it jointly with the children — or having to find cash they do not have to buy the children out. In the worst version, the house is sold to make the sums work, in the same year your family is grieving.
We have mapped the fixed legacy against average house prices across the UK to show where that pressure now bites, and where it does not. The pattern is stark, and it is entirely a function of where you happen to live.
At a glance
- The statutory legacy is £322,000 in England and Wales, fixed since 26 July 2023 and reviewed only occasionally — it does not track house prices.
- It is the amount a surviving spouse takes before children share the rest, not a guarantee that the home is safe.
- Where the home is worth more than the spouse's entitlement, the children are entitled to a share of it, held in trust until they are 18.
- A spouse who wants to keep the whole house may have to pay the children the difference in cash, which can force a sale.
- A will, backed by cover that provides the cash, is what actually keeps a surviving partner in the home.
What the statutory legacy actually is
The statutory legacy is the first slice a surviving spouse or civil partner takes from the estate of someone who dies intestate — without a valid will — where that person also left children. It is a fixed cash figure, set by order, and it sits at £322,000 in England and Wales.
Source: The figure is set by the Administration of Estates Act 1925 (Fixed Net Sum) Order 2023, which raised the statutory legacy to £322,000 with effect from 26 July 2023; it applies to England and Wales.
Two features of that sentence do the damage. It is fixed: it changes only when the government reviews it and lays a new order, which has happened rarely and unpredictably, with long stretches of no change at all. And it is a net sum paid before the children share anything, not a ring-fence around the house. The intestacy rules were written for an era and a housing market that no longer exist, and the gap between a frozen legacy and a moving property market is exactly the trap. It is one of several places where the default rules quietly fail the modern family, alongside the way stepchildren inherit nothing under intestacy however long they were part of it.
How intestacy carves up an estate that includes a house
Take the common case: you die intestate, survived by a spouse and children, and the biggest thing you own is the family home. The rules divide the estate like this.
- Your spouse takes your personal possessions outright.
- Your spouse takes the statutory legacy — £322,000 — plus interest from the date of death.
- Whatever is left over is split in two: your spouse takes half absolutely, and your children share the other half between them.
- The children's share is held on trust until they turn 18, because a minor cannot hold it directly.
Now put a house through that machine. If your whole estate is worth less than £322,000, the spouse takes everything and the children get nothing from the estate — the legacy swallows it. But if the estate is worth more, the children have a real, enforceable entitlement to part of the surplus, and the family home is usually the asset that surplus is locked up in. The house does not get a special exemption. It counts towards the numbers like any other asset.
The survivor does have one important right. Under the Intestates' Estates Act 1952, a surviving spouse can require the home they were living in to be transferred to them in or towards satisfaction of their entitlement — this is called appropriation. That is good news up to the value of what they are owed. The problem starts when the house is worth more than that.
The map: where £322,000 no longer covers the home
Whether any of this bites depends on one comparison: is your family home worth more than £322,000 on its own? If it is, the legacy alone cannot deliver the house to your spouse free and clear, and the children's entitlement reaches into the bricks and mortar. Set the frozen legacy against the Land Registry's average house prices and the country splits into two halves.
The broad picture from the UK House Price Index looks like this:
| Region or nation | Average home above the £322,000 legacy? |
|---|---|
| London | Well above |
| South East England | Above |
| East of England | Above |
| South West England | Around the line |
| West Midlands | Below |
| East Midlands | Below |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | Below |
| North West England | Below |
| North East England | Well below |
| Wales | Below |
| Scotland | Below |
| Northern Ireland | Below |
Source: HM Land Registry and partners, UK House Price Index, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Regional averages move every month; the directions shown are the broad, persistent pattern rather than a fixed figure.
The uncomfortable point is that identical rules produce opposite outcomes depending on the postcode. A surviving spouse in Durham or Hull may find the legacy comfortably covers the whole home; the same family in Guildford or almost anywhere in London finds the home worth far more than the legacy, so the children's share reaches into it. The law treats those two widows the same. The housing market does not. Because the averages shift month to month, the honest thing to do is check your own area rather than trust a regional headline — you can look up your local authority on the Land Registry UK House Price Index and set that figure against £322,000.
When the surviving spouse is forced to sell
Say the home is worth well above £322,000, and your spouse wants to keep it. They can appropriate it, but only up to the value of what they are owed — the legacy plus their half of the surplus. Above that, they have to make up the difference. They pay the children's share into the estate in cash, which lawyers call equality money.
That is the moment the plan falls apart for a lot of families, because the surviving spouse rarely has a spare six-figure sum sitting in an account. The cash was in the house. Their income has just dropped, because your income has gone. And the children's share cannot simply be waived away, because minor children's entitlements are protected — the money is theirs, held in trust, and the adults administering the estate have a duty to secure it. If the equality money cannot be found, the realistic options narrow to selling the home and splitting the proceeds, or the survivor taking on borrowing they may not be able to service alone.
The same squeeze falls hardest where a member of the household cannot easily move — a grown child with a disability who has always lived there, for instance. We look at that specific fear in whether a disabled daughter keeps the family home, and at how trustees can be empowered to support a home in whether trustees can pay towards a guardian's house extension. None of these levers exist unless someone set them up in advance.
The fix: a will, and the cash to make it work
Two things keep a surviving partner in the family home, and they work best together.
The first is a will. A will lets you leave the whole house to your spouse outright, or into a trust that lets them live there for life, instead of leaving the intestacy rules to hand a slice of it to children who are entitled to be paid out. A will is the difference between your spouse owning their home and your spouse owing money to a trust for the children. If you take nothing else from this page, take that: the £322,000 problem is a problem you only have if you die without a will.
The second is cash arriving at the right moment. Even with a good will, a family can face a bill it has to meet quickly — equality money to a first family's children, a mortgage that still has to be cleared, or simply the cost of staying put on one income. Life cover written in trust delivers a lump sum straight to the people you choose, outside the estate and its delays, at exactly the point the money is needed. Level term cover is the natural shape here, because you are protecting a fixed target — the value that has to be found to keep the home — rather than a shrinking one. If you want to see what that would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker size the cover against your own home's value and your family's situation.
It is worth being clear-eyed about how little the state provides by comparison. Bereavement support is modest and time-limited, and it is nowhere near mortgage-sized; we set that against real housing costs in what bereavement support is worth against the rent where you live. And a pre-paid funeral, useful as it is, buys a funeral and nothing else — it does not free up a penny towards the house, as we explain in why a funeral plan buys a funeral but not time.
Scotland and Northern Ireland
The £322,000 statutory legacy is an England and Wales figure. Do not carry it across a border.
Scotland does not use the statutory legacy at all. An intestate Scottish estate is dealt with through prior rights and legal rights before anything else is shared, and those work on an entirely different structure, with their own separate values for the house, the furniture and a cash sum. A surviving spouse's protection of the home in Scotland flows from prior rights, not from a single net legacy. Northern Ireland does use a statutory legacy on the same broad model as England and Wales, but it is set under Northern Ireland's own rules and its figure is not the same number, so you cannot assume £322,000 applies there either.
Wherever you live, the underlying message is identical: the intestacy rules were never designed to keep a family in a home that has quietly become worth more than the law's fixed figures. A will is what closes that gap. You can read the wider picture in our guide to wills, guardianship and children.
Frequently asked questions
What is the statutory legacy?
It is the fixed sum a surviving spouse or civil partner takes from an intestate estate in England and Wales before anything is shared with the children. It has been £322,000 since 26 July 2023, and it is reviewed periodically rather than rising automatically with prices. It applies only where the person left both a spouse and children and died without a valid will.
Does the statutory legacy include the house?
The legacy is a value, not a list of assets. The family home counts towards it, and a surviving spouse can ask for the property to be appropriated in satisfaction of their entitlement. Where the home is worth more, the balance is shared with the children, and the spouse may have to pay their share in cash to keep the whole house.
Will the statutory legacy go up?
It is reviewed from time to time rather than tracking house prices, and it has been left unchanged for long stretches in the past. Because the figure is fixed while property values move, identical rules produce very different outcomes in Durham and in Surrey. The only reliable way to protect a specific home is a will, not a hoped-for future increase in the legacy.