Short answer: A will lets you decide who gets your property, who raises your minor children, and who runs your estate when you die. Skip it, and California’s intestate succession statutes make those calls instead, using a fixed formula that ignores what you actually wanted. Under Probate Code § 6400, when a person dies without a valid will, the state’s intestacy rules control who inherits, not the decedent’s stated preferences. A will does not eliminate probate, but it does put you, not a statute, in charge of the outcome.
What happens in California if I die without a will?
Your property passes according to a fixed statutory order, regardless of what you would have wanted. For community and quasi-community property, a surviving spouse takes all of it, both their own half and the decedent’s half, under Probate Code § 6401(a)-(b). For separate property, the surviving spouse’s share depends entirely on who else survives: all of it if there are no surviving children, parents, or siblings; one-half if there is one child or that child’s issue, or no children but a surviving parent or sibling; one-third if there are two or more children. That breakdown comes from Probate Code § 6401(c).
If nothing passes to a surviving spouse, or the person who died was unmarried, the estate moves down a fixed line: first to children and grandchildren, then to parents, then to siblings and their children, then to grandparents and their descendants, under Probate Code § 6402. Two groups are left out entirely under this scheme: stepchildren who were never legally adopted, and unmarried partners. Neither inherits anything through intestate succession under Probate Code §§ 6401 and 6402, no matter how close the relationship was in life.
Does having a will keep my estate out of probate?
No. A will only takes effect once a court validates it through probate; by itself, it does not avoid the process. The only tool that passes assets to beneficiaries outside of probate is a properly funded revocable living trust, meaning the assets have actually been retitled into the trust’s name. Dying without a will does not avoid probate either. An intestate estate above the small estate threshold still goes through the same full, court-supervised probate process, under the same statutory fee schedule set out in Probate Code §§ 10800 and 10810, that a testate estate would go through.
California currently requires formal probate for any estate with assets subject to probate valued above $208,850, gross, before debts, for deaths on or after April 1, 2025, under Probate Code § 13100. That threshold applies whether or not a will exists. A will can still simplify probate considerably by naming an executor you trust and stating your wishes clearly, but the underlying court process is the same either way. Debts, taxes, and the costs of administration generally get paid out of the estate before any beneficiary receives a distribution, whether the estate passes under a will or under intestate succession.
Some assets skip probate on their own, with or without a will. Property held in joint tenancy, payable-on-death or transfer-on-death accounts, and life insurance or retirement accounts with a named beneficiary generally pass directly to the person named, outside of the probate process. A will has no effect on those assets. If most of what you own sits in accounts with named beneficiaries, a will still matters for guardianship and for anything left outside those designations, but it will not be doing the heavy lifting for your overall plan.
Who decides guardianship for my children if I don’t name one?
A will is the document that lets you name a guardian for your minor children in your own words, rather than leaving that decision to a judge who has never met your family. Without a nominated guardian, a court has to decide who raises your children based on the evidence in front of it, which may or may not reflect who you would have chosen. Naming a guardian also lets you address the practical details that matter to your family, such as who manages money set aside for your children until they are adults, and whether you want that person to be the same one raising your kids day to day.
Families sometimes name one person as guardian of the children and a different person or institution to manage the money, on the theory that the best caregiver is not always the best financial manager. A will is where you make that split explicit. Left blank, a court fills the gap using its own judgment on the facts in front of it, not yours.
Can a will reduce family conflict after I’m gone?
Clear, specific instructions leave less room for disagreement among the people left behind. When a will spells out who gets what and who is in charge of administering the estate, relatives are working from the same written document instead of competing memories of what someone “always said.” That does not eliminate the possibility of a dispute, particularly in blended families or where someone feels overlooked, but it gives an executor and the court something concrete to point to rather than a vacuum that intestate succession statutes fill by default.
A will you signed years ago and never revisited can create the same kind of confusion an intestate estate does, especially after a marriage, divorce, birth, or death in the family changes who you would actually want inheriting. Reviewing your will after major life events keeps it doing the job it was written for.
What to do next
If you have minor children, real property, or a family situation that does not map cleanly onto California’s intestate succession order (a blended family, an unmarried partner, a stepchild you never adopted), an unsigned will is doing you no good. Talk to an estate planning attorney about drafting one, and about whether a living trust should sit alongside it to handle probate avoidance. Ridley Law’s wills page and estate planning overview walk through what each document does and does not accomplish.
Figures verified July 2026.
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