Short answer: Any California adult, 18 or older and of sound mind, can make a valid will, and a DIY template is not automatically invalid just because a lawyer did not draft it. The risk is not the source of the document. It is whether the document meets California’s formalities and actually fits your family. If a will fails on either count, the court treats you as if you had none, and the intestate succession statutes, not your wishes, decide who inherits (Probate Code § 6400).
Who is legally allowed to make a will in California?
The eligibility bar is low by design: you need to be at least 18 years old and of sound mind at the time you sign. Sound mind for will purposes is a lower standard than people assume. It generally means you understand that you are making a will, you have a general sense of what you own, and you know who your natural heirs would be. Most adults clear that bar without difficulty. The harder question is almost never who can make a will. It is whether the will they made will actually hold up and do what they intended.
What does a valid California will actually require?
California recognizes two basic paths to a valid will. The first is a formal written will that you sign, generally in the presence of witnesses who watch you sign or acknowledge your signature and who then sign the document themselves. The second is a will written entirely in your own handwriting and signed, which does not require witnesses at all. Both paths look simple on paper. In practice, DIY kits and downloaded templates most often fail on execution: a missing witness signature, a will typed on a computer but treated as if it were handwritten, or a signature page that gets separated from the rest of the document. None of those errors show up until someone tries to probate the will, and by then the person who could fix them is gone.
What happens if a will fails, or there was never one?
This is where a defective DIY document and no will at all end up in the same place. Without a valid will, California’s intestate succession statutes control distribution regardless of what you actually wanted (Probate Code § 6400). For community and quasi-community property, a surviving spouse takes all of it, their own half plus the decedent’s half (Probate Code § 6401(a) to (b)). Separate property is split differently depending on who survives: the spouse gets everything if there are no surviving children, parents, or siblings; half if there is one child or no children but a surviving parent or sibling; and one-third if there are two or more children (Probate Code § 6401(c)). If nothing passes to a spouse, or there is no spouse, the estate moves down a fixed line: children first, then parents, then siblings, then grandparents, and outward from there (Probate Code § 6402). Stepchildren who were never legally adopted and unmarried partners generally inherit nothing under these rules, no matter how close the relationship actually was (Probate Code §§ 6401 to 6402). And dying without a valid will does not avoid probate. An intestate estate above the small estate threshold still goes through full, court-supervised probate under the same statutory fee schedule as an estate with a will (Probate Code §§ 10800, 10810).
Why do DIY will kits fall short in California specifically?
A generic template is written to be valid somewhere, not necessarily to be valid here. California has its own execution formalities, its own community property rules, and its own probate process, and a national kit has no way to know which of your assets are community property, whether your named guardian for minor children is realistic, or whether your blended family needs language a standard template does not include. The kit also cannot tell you that a will, even a perfectly executed one, still has to go through probate to take effect. It transfers nothing on its own. Only a properly funded revocable living trust moves assets to beneficiaries outside of court supervision, and a trust that was never funded, meaning assets were never retitled into it, does not avoid probate for whatever was left out.
Does having any will mean you can skip probate?
No. A will only takes effect once a court validates it through the probate process. That is true whether the will came from an attorney or a template, and it is one of the most common misunderstandings clients bring into a first meeting. If avoiding probate is the actual goal, the tool for that is a funded living trust, not a will. If you already have a will and are not sure whether it was ever paired with a trust, that gap is worth checking before it matters. Our wills page and living trust page lay out how the two documents work together and where each one falls short on its own.
What to do next
If you already have a DIY will, have someone check that it was signed and witnessed correctly and that it still reflects your family and your assets. If you do not have one, the eligibility requirements are easy to meet, but meeting California’s execution rules and actually covering your family’s situation is the part worth getting right the first time. A conversation with an estate planning attorney can tell you quickly which category your situation falls into.
Figures verified July 2026.
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