You already have a will. The state wrote it.

Everyone who owns anything has a will. Most people did not write theirs. Every state keeps a statute on the books setting out exactly who inherits when a person dies without one, and that statute takes effect automatically, in full, the moment it is needed. It is called intestate succession, and it is a will in every practical sense: a fixed list of who gets what, written in advance, applied without argument.

The difference is what it knows. It knows marriage, blood and adoption. It does not know that one child has been supporting a parent for a decade and another has not spoken to them since 2009. It does not know that the person who shared a house for twenty years was never married to the deceased. It does not know that the surviving spouse needs the whole house rather than a fraction of it. It divides by category and it divides the same way every time.

There is no federal law of inheritance. Congress has never written one, and the states have never agreed among themselves, so the answer to a question as basic as whether a widow inherits everything depends entirely on which state the person lived in when they died. The rules below come from real statutes in named states, and they disagree with each other. That disagreement is the point.

This guide is educational information. It is not legal, tax or financial advice.

Take one situation and run it through three states. A married person dies without a will, leaving a spouse and two adult children, all of them the children of that marriage. Nothing exotic.

Three states, three answers, and none of them is everything to the spouse. New York states its figure flat in the statute. California uses no dollar figure at all, only fractions, and treats property acquired during the marriage differently from property brought into it. Michigan takes a sum off the top before splitting, and the size of that sum changes depending on whose children the children are.

That last mechanism is the one worth understanding, because it is the modern approach and more states are moving toward it. Michigan sets six separate cases, and they do not all work the same way. Where no descendant and no parent survives, the spouse simply takes the whole estate, with no sum and no fraction involved. In four of the remaining cases the spouse takes the same fixed sum off the top, and what changes is the fraction of the balance: half in most of them, but three quarters where the deceased left no children and a parent survived. The fixed sum itself drops in exactly one case, which is where none of the deceased's children are the surviving spouse's children. The statute is trying to guess how much a stepparent should hand across to stepchildren, and it guesses the same way in every household.

Change the family shape and the answer moves again. A spouse and no children takes the whole estate in New York and in California. Children and no spouse takes the whole estate in both. The disagreement is concentrated in the one case that is most common, which is a spouse and children together.

What happens when a child has already died

New York and California both divide among descendants "by representation", and the mechanic is worth knowing because it decides whether grandchildren inherit and how much. The method itself is not uniform: California uses the rule below, while about a third of states have adopted the newer approach of dividing per capita at each generation, which can produce a different answer once more than one branch of a family has lost someone. California's rule divides the estate into equal shares at the nearest generation that has anyone living in it, counting both the living members and the dead ones who left children of their own. Each living member takes a share, and each dead member's share is divided the same way among their own children.

So a person with three children, one of whom died leaving two children of their own, does not produce a five way split. It produces three shares at the children's level. The two surviving children take one each, and the third share is halved between the two grandchildren. A grandchild whose parent is still alive inherits nothing at this stage, which is the correct result and a regular source of family argument.