The part of your estate nobody can see
When an executor walks into a house after a death, the physical estate announces itself: paperwork in drawers, bank statements in the post, keys on hooks. The digital estate does the opposite. Email, cloud photo libraries, online-only bank accounts, PayPal balances, domain names, a crypto wallet on a phone: none of it is visible unless someone knew it existed, and almost all of it sits behind passwords the deceased took with them. Paper statements have largely given way to logins, which means a modern estate can have entire asset categories that leave no physical trace at all.
Two facts shape everything that follows. First, no UK statute gives your family a general right of access to your online accounts; what happens to each one is decided by the terms and conditions you accepted when you opened it. Second, planning tools do exist, both the legacy features platforms provide and the simple discipline of a digital inventory, but every one of them only works if it is set up before death. This guide walks through both, along with the inheritance tax position for digital assets that carry real value. It is general information to help you plan, not legal or financial advice for your specific situation.
What counts as a digital asset, and who ends up controlling it
"Digital asset" covers everything from a Bitcoin wallet worth tens of thousands of pounds to a Netflix profile worth nothing. The useful distinction for estate planning is between things with monetary value that pass to the estate, things you only ever licensed, and things with sentimental value where the fight is about access rather than money.
| Category | Examples | Owned or licensed? | What happens at death |
|---|---|---|---|
| Money and near-money | Online-only bank accounts, PayPal and e-money balances, investment apps | Owned | Passes to the estate; providers have bereavement processes and release funds to executors |
| Cryptoassets | Exchange accounts, hardware and software wallets | Owned | Part of the estate for inheritance tax, but recoverable only with keys or exchange cooperation |
| Income-producing assets | Domain names, monetised YouTube channels, online shops | Owned (or contractual rights) | Can be transferred or sold by the estate, subject to each registrar's or platform's process |
| Media libraries | Film, music, ebook and app purchases | Licensed | Licence is personal and generally ends at death; cannot be gifted in a will |
| Sentimental and personal | Email, cloud photos, social media profiles | Licensed (account), owned (your own content) | Access governed by platform terms; memorialisation, deletion or limited data release |
The licensed category surprises families most. Years of film and music "purchases" on the major stores are, in the small print, personal licences to stream or download, not property you can pass on. A five-figure sum spent on a digital library typically produces nothing for the estate, whereas the same money spent on physical media or downloadable DRM-free files would have. There is no planning fix for this beyond knowing it: if leaving a music or film collection to your children matters to you, the format you buy in decides whether that is possible.
The legal position: a new Act, but no right of access
England and Wales took a real step in December 2025. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 2 December 2025, confirms that a thing is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is digital or electronic. In plain terms, crypto tokens and similar assets are now firmly recognised as property, which matters for estates because property can be owned, valued, inherited and recovered through the courts.
It is worth being clear about what the Act does not do. It does not create a right for executors or family members to access accounts, does not override platform terms and conditions, and does not solve the practical problem of lost keys. The law of digital estates remains an emerging area: ownership questions are becoming clearer while access remains contractual, platform by platform. HMRC's position on the tax side is already settled, though. The Cryptoassets Manual at CRYPTO25000 states that cryptoassets are property for the purposes of inheritance tax, so an executor's duty to value the estate extends to every wallet and exchange account, whether or not anyone can currently open it.
Cryptocurrency: the highest-stakes corner of a digital estate
Crypto combines three risks no other asset class shares. It can be genuinely invisible, with no statements, no post and no institution writing to the executor. It can be genuinely irrecoverable, because a self-custodied wallet has no forgotten-password route; whoever holds the private key or seed phrase holds the asset, and nobody else can help. And it is still taxable throughout: the estate owes inheritance tax on the date-of-death value of a holding even if the keys are never found.
How executors can discover crypto they were never told about
Most guidance stops at "tell someone your passwords", which does nothing for the executor of someone who never did. If you are administering an estate and suspect crypto might exist, there is a practical search sequence:
- Bank and card statements. Look for transfers to or from exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance and Gemini are the names that appear most often on UK statements), including small historic amounts. A £200 transfer in 2017 can matter enormously now.
- Email, if you can lawfully access it. Search for exchange names, "wallet", "seed", "recovery phrase", "2FA" and trade-confirmation subject lines. Email access itself depends on the provider's bereavement process, which is one more reason email sits at the centre of any digital inventory.
- Devices and paper. Hardware wallets look like USB sticks (Ledger and Trezor are the common brands). Seed phrases are usually 12 or 24 handwritten words on paper or stamped metal, often stored with important documents or in a safe. Do not wipe or recycle any device until the search is complete.
- Apps on the deceased's phone. An exchange or wallet app is direct evidence a holding exists, even if the phone is locked; the app's provider can then be approached through its bereavement route.
Where a holding sat on an exchange, executors can usually recover it by completing the exchange's deceased-customer process with a death certificate and, for larger balances, the grant of probate, though each exchange sets its own requirements and overseas exchanges add a cross-border layer covered in our guide to international probate and overseas assets. Take the example of Ana and Dev, siblings administering their father's estate. A line on an old bank statement led them to an exchange account holding coins worth £24,000 at the date of death. That figure went into the estate's inheritance tax account like any other asset, and the exchange released the funds to the estate after probate. Had their father moved the coins to a private wallet and told no one the seed phrase, the tax position would have been identical and the recovery position hopeless.
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Set up the platform legacy tools while you can
The large platforms now offer tools that do in minutes what an executor cannot do in months:
- Facebook legacy contact. You nominate someone who can manage your memorialised profile after death, pinning a tribute post and handling new friend requests, or you can opt to have the account deleted instead.
- Apple Digital Legacy. You add a legacy contact who receives an access key. After your death, the key plus a death certificate lets them access the iCloud data in your account, including photos. Without this set up in advance, Apple's default position gives family very limited routes to a locked account.
- Google Inactive Account Manager. You choose a period of inactivity after which Google notifies your chosen contacts and can share the data you selected, or delete the account. It covers Gmail, Drive and Google Photos in one setting.
Treat these three as the minimum. Each takes a few minutes, costs nothing and removes a negotiation your grieving family would otherwise have with a platform's bereavement team. For government-facing accounts, the picture is simpler: the Tell Us Once service lets whoever registers the death notify HMRC, DVLA, the Passport Office and other public bodies in a single step.
The digital inventory: access details with the will, never in it
A will that says "I leave my cryptocurrency to my son" is only half a plan. The other half is a route to the asset, and that route must not be written into the will itself, for two reasons. A will becomes a public document once probate is granted, so anyone can order a copy and read whatever it contains. And passwords change constantly while wills are updated rarely, so credentials in a will are usually stale as well as exposed.
The working pattern is a three-layer split:
- The will gifts the assets and can refer to a memorandum or letter of wishes about digital matters, without reciting any credentials.
- The inventory is a plain list of what exists: every account, provider, wallet and domain, with account identifiers but no passwords. Stored with your will or wherever your executor will look first, and reviewed yearly.
- The access layer holds the secrets: a password manager with a trusted emergency contact, or a sealed document in a safe or with the professional holding your will. Seed phrases for crypto deserve the most careful treatment of all, since anyone holding one controls the asset immediately.
Building the inventory is a natural part of will preparation, and our making-a-will checklist includes digital assets as a step alongside the traditional ones. If you are on the other side of this, administering an estate rather than planning one, the digital sweep belongs early in the process; our first 30 days for executors guide and the wider walkthrough of valuing an estate for probate show where it fits among the other duties, and our probate pillar guide covers the process end to end.
Where to get help
Digital estates sit at an awkward junction of contract terms, emerging property law and tax, and the cost of getting them wrong ranges from lost photographs to a permanently unrecoverable holding that the estate still paid tax on. If you are writing or updating a will, ask the professional drafting it to deal with digital assets explicitly, including the memorandum and inventory structure above. If you are an executor facing locked accounts, an unresponsive overseas platform or a crypto holding you cannot value or reach, a probate specialist with digital-asset experience can take that strand off your hands while you deal with the rest of the estate. We can put you in touch with one who handles exactly these questions.