Your Passwords Are Not in Your Will: Settling a Digital Estate in England and Wales

When an estate is administered in England and Wales, the personal representative's task is conceptually simple: identify the assets, settle the liabilities, and distribute what remains according to the will or the rules of intestacy. The framework owes much of its shape to the Administration of Estates Act 1925 — a statute drafted in a world of ledgers, land registries and share certificates. It is safe to say its drafters did not anticipate that a typical estate in 2025 might include a Bitcoin wallet, a lifetime of Gmail correspondence, a Dropbox archive of family photographs, and eleven recurring subscriptions.

Yet that is precisely what executors now face. And the law, in many respects, has not caught up.

What Counts as a Digital Asset?

The first difficulty is definitional. Digital assets fall into roughly three camps, and the legal treatment of each differs markedly.

The first camp comprises assets with genuine monetary value — cryptocurrency holdings, domain names, PayPal balances, income-generating YouTube channels. These are treated as property for probate purposes and pass with the estate in the ordinary way. The complication is practical rather than legal: a private key written on a scrap of paper in a kitchen drawer is worthless to an executor who does not know it exists.

The second camp covers accounts with sentimental or administrative value — email, cloud photo storage, social media profiles. Here the position is murkier. Whether the contents of an email account constitute property capable of transmission is genuinely unsettled. What the executor typically receives instead is a governed process: each platform applies its own terms of service, and those terms vary widely.

The third camp — streaming subscriptions, loyalty points, ebooks — is often overlooked entirely. Most are little more than licences, personal to the account holder and extinguished on death. Netflix does not pass to your heirs; it simply ends.

The Executor's Uneven Playing Field

Platform policies create a patchwork that no testator should assume will work in their family's favour.

Google offers an Inactive Account Manager, allowing users to nominate contacts who may receive data after a period of inactivity. Apple's Digital Legacy programme similarly permits nominated Legacy Contacts to access iCloud data. Meta allows profiles to be memorialised or permanently removed. These mechanisms are welcome, but they operate outside the will and outside probate. A grant of representation, in many cases, does not unlock a platform account — the platform's own consent process does.

Cryptocurrency presents the starkest problem. There is no customer service department to petition and no recovery process to invoke. A decentralised wallet is only as accessible as its private keys. If those keys are lost, the assets remain on the blockchain — technically owned by the estate, practically unreachable. Probate professionals have begun referring to this as the 'cold storage problem', and it is estimated that billions of pounds' worth of cryptocurrency is already permanently stranded worldwide.

It is also worth flagging the Computer Misuse Act 1990. An executor who guesses, borrows or circumvents credentials to access a deceased relative's account may, depending on the circumstances, stray into unlawful territory. Good intentions are not a defence.

A Practical Checklist for Digital Estate Planning

Families who take a modest amount of preparatory action spare their executors considerable distress. We recommend the following:

• Inventory the accounts. List email providers, financial platforms, social media, cloud storage, subscription services and any cryptocurrency holdings. Store the list securely and tell someone where it is.
• Record access information separately. Passwords should never appear in the will itself, which becomes a public document upon probate. A letter of wishes held with a solicitor, or a reputable digital vault service, is more appropriate.
• Use platform tools proactively. Nominate legacy contacts and inactive account managers now, while the account holder is able to do so.
• Address digital assets expressly in the will. A short clause granting executors authority to access, manage, transfer or close digital accounts removes ambiguity and signals intent.
• Give specific instructions for cryptocurrency. Identify where keys or seed phrases are stored, and consider professional custody arrangements for significant holdings.
• Review regularly. Digital footprints change quickly. An inventory drafted five years ago is unlikely to be accurate today.

Where the Law Is Heading

Reform proposals, including work by the Law Commission on digital assets and property, acknowledge that the 1925 framework strains against intangible, jurisdiction-less holdings. Until legislation clarifies matters, careful drafting and honest family conversations remain the most reliable protection.

At Bentley Law, we incorporate digital asset provisions into wills as a matter of course. If your current will predates your online life — as most do — an hour's conversation now may spare your executors months of frustration later. Contact our private client team to arrange a consultation.