Who Inherits Your Passwords?

Who Inherits Your Passwords? Death, Digital Assets and the New Probate Problem

When most people sit down to write a will, they picture the big things: the house, the savings, the car, who should have the good watch and the wedding ring. What almost nobody pictures is their email account, and yet for many of us that inbox has quietly become the master key to everything else we own. The bank statements arrive there, the investment platforms send their logins there, the photo library backs itself up somewhere behind it, and the password resets for every other account in our lives all route through it.

Our lives have moved online faster than our wills have. Research by the Law Society found that of people who had made a will, 93% had not included any digital assets at all, and only around a quarter of us have any idea what actually happens to our digital lives when we die. The result is a new and genuinely awkward probate problem, and families up and down the country are discovering it at the worst possible moment.

The estate nobody can see

Executors have always started with the paperwork. A generation ago, a person’s financial life announced itself through the letterbox for months after they died, in the form of bank statements, share certificates, dividend cheques and insurance renewals, and a diligent executor could build a fairly complete picture just by opening the post. That safety net has largely gone. Online-only banks and trading apps send nothing physical at all, subscriptions keep billing a card nobody knew about, cryptocurrency can sit in a wallet no institution administers, and treasured photographs live in a cloud account rather than a shoebox in the wardrobe.

This is really an extension of something we have written about before, which is that each generation now leaves behind a very different digital footprint. The person who dies in their eighties may leave a paper trail an executor can follow; the person who dies in their forties may leave almost none, and a surprising amount of value along with it.

When grief meets terms and conditions

The case that brought all this home to the public involved a London widow, Rachel Thompson, whose husband died in 2015 without leaving a will. The family photographs and videos of their young daughter’s early years, thousands of them, sat in his Apple account, and although Mrs Thompson was his sole heir and executrix, a grant of probate was not enough for Apple, which insisted on a specific court order before it would release anything. It took her roughly three years to get one. When Central London County Court finally granted access, the judge remarked that there really ought to be a clearer procedure for cases like this, because they were only going to become more common.

He was right, and the technology companies have since built some tools of their own. Apple now offers a Legacy Contact, Google has its Inactive Account Manager, and Facebook allows accounts to be memorialised or deleted. The trouble is that these features only work if someone sets them up while they are alive, which requires the one thing most of us avoid doing: sitting down and planning for our own absence. Take-up remains low, and so families keep finding themselves negotiating with a helpdesk while they are grieving.

The law is catching up, slowly

There has at least been real movement on the legal side. For years, English law was uncertain about whether things like cryptocurrency were even “property” in the traditional sense, because they are neither a physical object you can hold nor a conventional legal right like a debt. That uncertainty was resolved when the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 received Royal Assent in December, confirming that digital assets can form a third category of personal property. In plain terms, your crypto, and potentially other digital things, can now be owned, inherited, left in a will and fought over in court like anything else you possess.

What the Act cannot do is open a locked wallet. Ownership and access are entirely different problems, and this is where digital assets part company with everything the probate system was built for. If a house key is lost, the estate still owns the house and a locksmith solves the rest. If the seed phrase for a cryptocurrency wallet dies with its owner, the assets remain legally part of the estate while being, for all practical purposes, gone forever. Industry estimates suggest a meaningful slice of all bitcoin ever created is already stranded this way, some of it belonging to people who are no longer here to mind.

What you can actually do about it

The good news is that fixing this for your own family is neither expensive nor complicated. Start with an inventory, even a rough one, of where your digital life actually lives: the email accounts, the banking and investment apps, the crypto, the photo storage, the domain names, the social media. Then decide who should be able to reach it, set up the legacy features your providers already offer, and consider a password manager with an emergency access function so that one trusted person can get in if the worst happens.

One thing you should not do, tempting as it sounds, is write your passwords into the will itself, because once probate is granted a will becomes a public document that anyone can order a copy of. Passwords belong in a separate, secure note that your executor knows how to find. It is also worth knowing that an executor simply logging in with the deceased’s credentials can breach a provider’s terms and, in some circumstances, sit uncomfortably close to offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, so the proper routes, slow as they sometimes are, matter.

And where someone has died leaving a thin or puzzling paper trail, the picture can usually still be rebuilt. Professional asset tracing exists for exactly this situation, piecing together accounts, shareholdings, property and other holdings that the paperwork never mentioned, so that an estate can be administered on the basis of what the person actually owned rather than what happened to be in the folder marked “important”.

If you are administering an estate and suspect there are assets you cannot see, Tremark Associates can help. Call our team on 0113 263 6466 or use the form below to discuss how we can support your case.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I put my passwords in my will?

No. After probate is granted, a will becomes a public document in England and Wales, so anything written in it can be read by strangers. Keep passwords in a secure separate record, such as a password manager with emergency access or a sealed letter of wishes, and make sure your executor knows it exists and how to reach it.

Can my executor just log in to my accounts after I die?

They generally should not, even with the right password. Most providers’ terms prohibit anyone else using an account, and unauthorised access can raise issues under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The safer route is for executors to use each provider’s bereavement or legacy process, supported by the death certificate and grant of probate.

Is cryptocurrency legally part of an estate?

Yes. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 confirmed that digital assets such as crypto-tokens can be personal property under the law of England and Wales, which means they form part of the estate and pass under a will or intestacy. Practical access is a separate matter, though, and without the keys or recovery details the assets may be impossible to recover.

What if we think the estate has assets we cannot find?

It is a common situation, particularly where the person banked and invested online. Professional asset tracing can identify dormant accounts, shareholdings, property and other holdings from lawful sources, giving executors a fuller picture of the estate before it is distributed.