Updating a will after marriage or divorce: the revocation rules

Marriage cancels your will. Divorce does not. Most people assume the opposite

Two of the biggest life events point in opposite legal directions, and the direction is not the one instinct suggests. In England and Wales, getting married automatically revokes any will you made before the wedding. Divorce, the event people assume tears up their estate planning, does not revoke a will at all: the law simply reads the document as if your former spouse had died on the day the marriage legally ended. Both rules come from the Wills Act 1837, and both catch families out for the same reason, nobody tells you at the time. This guide sets out what each event actually changes, the clause that lets a pre-wedding will survive, and how to put things right afterwards. It is general information about how the rules work, not legal advice for your own situation, and it covers England and Wales (Scotland has different rules on both points).

What marriage does: automatic revocation under section 18

GOV.UK's guidance on making a will puts it plainly: getting married cancels any will you made before. The statutory source is section 18 of the Wills Act 1837, which provides that a will is revoked by the testator's marriage, subject to the contemplation exception covered below. Forming a civil partnership does exactly the same thing under section 18B. There is no grace period and no partial effect: the moment the ceremony is complete, the old will is gone, whether it was made forty years ago or forty days ago.

What fills the gap is intestacy. If you die after the wedding without signing a new will, your estate is distributed under the intestacy rules, and those rules put your new spouse first. Where there are children, the spouse takes the personal possessions, a statutory legacy of £322,000 and half of everything above it, with the children sharing the other half; you can check who would inherit in any scenario with GOV.UK's intestacy tool, and our guide to the intestacy split between a spouse and children works through the figures.

The revocation rule bites hardest on second marriages. Take Marcus, 58, divorced years ago, with a will leaving his £700,000 estate equally to his two adult daughters. He remarries and, like most people, never connects the wedding to the will. When he dies three years later, that will is void. Under intestacy his new wife receives his personal possessions, £322,000 and half of the remaining £378,000, a total of around £511,000. His daughters share £189,000 between them, £94,500 each instead of the £350,000 each their father's will intended. Nothing malicious happened; a rule almost nobody knows about simply rewrote his estate. The same mechanism is what makes so-called predatory marriages effective, which we cover in our piece on deathbed marriages and their effect on intestacy.

The contemplation-of-marriage clause: how a will survives the wedding

Section 18 contains its own escape hatch. A will is not revoked if it appears from the will that the testator was expecting to be married to a particular person and intended that the will should not be revoked by that marriage. Two elements must both show on the face of the document:

• A specific, identified person. "My fiancée, Sarah Jane Woodall" works. "Anyone I may later marry" does not: the section is aimed at a particular expected marriage, not marriage in general.
• A stated intention that the will survives. The will needs to make clear it is intended to remain effective after that marriage takes place, not merely mention the engagement.

In practice, professionally drafted wills for engaged couples carry a declaration along these lines: "This will is made in contemplation of my marriage to [full name] and shall not be revoked by that marriage." Some wills go further and state that the will takes effect only if the marriage happens within a set period. We share that pattern as information about how the clause is commonly structured, not as wording to copy into a homemade will; the cases in this area turn on fine points of expression, and a clause that fails leaves you intestate. Two limits are worth underlining. The exception protects the will only against the marriage it anticipates, so if the engagement ends and you later marry someone else, the will is revoked as normal. And the statute allows a middle position where only certain provisions are intended to survive, which is another reason the drafting deserves care. The same contemplation mechanism applies to civil partnerships under section 18B.

What divorce does: your ex is treated as already dead, the will lives on

Divorce works completely differently. Under section 18A of the Wills Act 1837, when a court dissolves or annuls a marriage, the will takes effect as if the former spouse had died on the date the marriage was dissolved or annulled. Three consequences flow from that single fiction:

• Gifts to the ex-spouse fail. Whatever the will left them passes as if they had predeceased you: to any substitute beneficiary the will names, otherwise into the residuary estate, and if the failed gift was the residue itself, potentially out under intestacy.
• Their appointments lapse. If the will named the ex-spouse as executor or trustee, or gave them a power of appointment, those provisions fall away. If they were the sole executor, nobody named in the will can administer the estate, and someone else must step in.
• Everything else stands. The will is not revoked. Every other gift, every other appointment and every other clause carries on exactly as written.

Two caveats sit inside the section. A will can show a contrary intention, deliberately keeping the former spouse as a beneficiary or executor, and that intention will be respected. And the ex-spouse keeps the right to apply to the court for financial provision under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, so being written out by section 18A is not always the end of the story.

Timing matters more than most people realise. Section 18A operates only from the final order of divorce (the old decree absolute) or the dissolution order for a civil partnership. Separation, however long and however formalised, changes nothing: an estranged spouse you have not lived with for a decade still inherits under your will, and still ranks first under intestacy if you have no will. During the often lengthy gap between separating and the final order, your estate plan is exactly what it was during the marriage unless you change it.

Event	Effect on an existing will
Marriage	Will revoked entirely (unless made in contemplation of that marriage)
Civil partnership formed	Will revoked entirely (same contemplation exception)
Separation, including judicial separation	No effect; spouse still inherits and can still act as executor
Final order of divorce or dissolution	Will stands, but the ex is treated as having died on that date: gifts to them fail, appointments lapse
Remarriage after divorce	The post-divorce will (or any earlier will) is revoked by the new marriage

Codicil or new will?

Once you know an update is needed, there are two vehicles. GOV.UK confirms that the only way to change an existing will is a codicil, an official alteration that must be signed and witnessed with the same formalities as the will itself, and that there is no limit on how many codicils a will can carry. Crossing things out or writing amendments on the original does nothing except invite a dispute.

In practice, the codicil suits small, self-contained adjustments: swapping an executor, updating a cash legacy, changing a funeral wish. Marriage and divorce are rarely small adjustments. After marriage there is usually no valid will left to amend, so a new will is the only option. After divorce the changes tend to be structural, a new main beneficiary, new executors, perhaps guardians and trust provisions for children, and a fresh will that expressly revokes all earlier wills and codicils leaves one clean document instead of a paper trail that has to be found, read together and reconciled after your death. Making a new will also needs the usual validity foundations, including capacity, which we cover in our guide to mental capacity and will validity.

Putting it right: a short sequence for either event

Whether you are engaged, newly married, separating or divorced, the sequence is the same. Establish what your current position is: does a valid will exist at all, and if so, who takes under it today? Our making a will checklist walks through the assets, people and decisions a new will needs to cover, and our wills pillar guide explains the formalities that make it valid. Engaged couples should raise the contemplation clause before the wedding rather than after. Anyone separating should treat the new will as urgent rather than something to fold into the financial settlement later, and surviving spouses reviewing an older mirror will can start with our hub for surviving spouses. Because both rules operate automatically and the drafting points (contemplation wording, substitute gifts, contrary intentions) are exactly where homemade documents fail, this is a topic where having a wills specialist prepare or check the document is genuinely worth it: the meeting is short, and it closes off the two most common ways a family's inheritance ends up in the wrong hands.