When someone dies without a valid will, intestate succession laws decide who inherits. Every state uses a priority order built on family relationships: the surviving spouse and children come first, then parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives. The exact shares differ from state to state, but the hierarchy is remarkably consistent. If no qualifying relative can be found anywhere on the family tree, the estate goes to the state government.
What Property This Actually Controls
Intestate succession only governs the probate estate, meaning property titled solely in the deceased person’s name at death. That includes individually owned real estate, personal belongings, vehicles, bank accounts without a payable-on-death designation, and individual brokerage accounts.
Anything with a built-in transfer mechanism skips the process entirely. Life insurance with a named beneficiary, joint bank accounts with survivorship rights, retirement accounts with a designated beneficiary, and real estate held in joint tenancy pass directly to the survivor or named person without court involvement.
The complication is failed designations. A 401(k) whose named beneficiary died years ago and was never updated typically reverts to the estate, which puts it under intestate rules. The same happens with a life insurance policy that still names an ex-spouse after a divorce, though some states automatically revoke a former spouse’s beneficiary status when the marriage ends. Any financial account without a current, living beneficiary becomes part of the intestate pool.
The Order of Inheritance
The Surviving Spouse
A legal spouse sits at the top of the hierarchy in every state. How much the spouse receives depends on who else survives.
Under the Uniform Probate Code, which many states have adopted in some form, the spouse inherits the entire estate when the deceased left no surviving descendants and no surviving parents. When all of the deceased’s children are also children of the surviving spouse, and neither spouse has children from another relationship, the spouse typically still takes everything.
Blended families shrink the spousal share. If the surviving spouse has children from a prior relationship, or the deceased had children who are not the surviving spouse’s children, the spouse usually receives a fixed dollar amount plus a percentage of the rest, with the balance going to the descendants. The initial dollar share commonly falls somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000, plus half of what remains. Some states skip the dollar formula entirely and give the spouse a flat fraction such as one-third or one-half.
Only a legally recognized marriage qualifies. About ten states and the District of Columbia still recognize common-law marriage, where a couple can be treated as married without a license or ceremony if they mutually agreed to be married, lived together, and held themselves out publicly as spouses. A common-law spouse who meets those requirements has the same intestate rights as any other spouse. Simply living together, even for decades, does not create a common-law marriage, and unmarried partners in states that don’t recognize common-law marriage inherit nothing under intestate succession.
Children and Other Descendants
After the spouse’s share is set, children take whatever remains. With no surviving spouse, children inherit the entire estate.
All biological children have equal rights, whether born inside or outside of marriage, and even if born after the parent’s death. A child conceived before the parent dies but born afterward still qualifies.
Adopted children hold the same legal status as biological children for inheritance purposes. An adoption generally severs the legal relationship with the biological parents, so the adopted child inherits from the adoptive family rather than the birth family. Stepparent adoptions are the main exception: when a stepparent adopts a child, the child keeps inheritance rights from the biological parent who is married to that stepparent.
Stepchildren who were never formally adopted do not inherit. This is one of the most common surprises families face. The law treats an unadopted stepchild as a legal stranger, no matter how the family actually lived. Grandchildren inherit only if their own parent, the deceased’s child, died first; in that case, they step into their parent’s share.
Parents, Siblings, and Beyond
If no spouse and no descendants survive, the estate moves up to the parents. Two surviving parents split it equally; one surviving parent takes everything. Age and financial need don’t factor in.
With no surviving parents, the estate passes to siblings and their descendants. Half-siblings inherit on equal footing with full siblings under the UPC, and most states follow that approach. A sibling who died before the deceased is represented by their own children, who take that sibling’s share.
From there the search moves outward to grandparents, then aunts and uncles, then first cousins. Each level inherits only if nobody closer survives. Some states cap the search at a certain degree of kinship; others let very distant relatives claim. When the court exhausts the family tree, the estate escheats to the state treasury.
How a Share Gets Split Among Descendants
“The children inherit equally” is simple when all of the children are alive. It gets complicated when one of them died first and left children of their own. Three methods exist for dividing the estate in that situation, and the one your state uses can produce very different results.
Per stirpes (Latin for “by the roots”) divides by family branch. Each of the deceased person’s children is one branch and takes one share. If a child has already died, that child’s share drops down intact and is split among their children. Every branch gets the same total amount, even if one branch produced five grandchildren and another produced one.
Strict per capita (“by the head”) ignores branches and splits the estate equally among all living heirs at the nearest generation with at least one survivor. Few states use the pure form because the outcomes can feel arbitrary across generations.
Per capita at each generation, the UPC approach, is a hybrid. It splits the estate into equal shares at the first generation with a living member. Each living person at that level gets one share. The shares that would have gone to deceased members at that level are pooled and redistributed equally among all of their descendants at the next generation down. Cousins at the same generational level always receive equal shares, which prevents one grandchild from inheriting far more than a cousin just because their parent happened to have fewer siblings.
When an Heir Loses the Right to Inherit
Qualifying on the family tree isn’t enough on its own. Two rules can knock an otherwise-eligible heir out.
Slayer statutes exist in nearly every state. An heir who feloniously and intentionally kills the deceased forfeits all inheritance rights, and the estate passes as if the killer had died first. The forfeiture reaches intestate shares, life insurance proceeds, joint tenancy rights, and any other benefit flowing from the death. A criminal conviction conclusively establishes the forfeiture, but a probate court can also make its own finding by a preponderance of the evidence under the UPC. Several states have extended these rules beyond homicide to cover elder abuse, financial exploitation, and neglect.
The second rule is survivorship. Under the UPC, an heir must outlive the deceased by at least 120 hours, roughly five days, to inherit. An heir who dies within that window, for example in the same car accident, is treated as having predeceased. This keeps property from running through two estates in quick succession and from ending up with a different set of relatives than anyone intended.
What Heirs Actually Receive
Debts Get Paid First
Heirs inherit what’s left after debts, not the gross estate. The administrator must pay valid claims before distributing anything, roughly in this order: administrative expenses such as court costs and attorney fees, funeral expenses, tax debts, secured debts, and finally general unsecured creditors.
Federal tax debts get special treatment. Under the Federal Priority Statute, an insolvent estate must pay federal claims before other unsecured creditors.
If the estate is genuinely insolvent, heirs receive nothing. The flip side is that heirs are not personally responsible for the deceased’s debts beyond what the estate can cover. A creditor cannot pursue a child or spouse for a credit card balance unless that person co-signed or shared the account, even when debt collectors suggest otherwise.
Taxes on What You Inherit
An inheritance received through intestate succession is generally not taxable income to you. It doesn’t go on your income tax return the way wages or investment gains would.
The federal estate tax applies only to estates exceeding $15,000,000 in 2026, a threshold set by legislation signed in July 2025.1Internal Revenue Service. What’s New – Estate and Gift Tax That tax is paid by the estate before distribution, not by individual heirs, and most estates owe nothing. A handful of states impose their own estate or inheritance taxes at lower thresholds.
Inherited property comes with a stepped-up basis, which is a meaningful tax benefit. Your basis in a house or stock resets to its fair market value on the date of death. If a parent bought a house for $80,000 and it was worth $400,000 at death, your basis is $400,000. Sell it soon after for $410,000 and you owe capital gains tax on $10,000, not on the $330,000 of appreciation that built up during the parent’s lifetime.
Retirement accounts are the exception to the no-income-tax rule. Distributions from an inherited 401(k) or traditional IRA are taxable to you, just as they would have been to the original owner. The problem compounds when a retirement account has no valid beneficiary designation and falls into the estate: non-individual beneficiaries like estates face less favorable distribution timelines, which can accelerate the tax hit.2Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Beneficiary
Small Estate Shortcuts
Full probate is expensive and slow, so every state offers a simplified process for smaller estates, typically called a small estate affidavit or summary administration. Instead of a months-long court case, an heir files a sworn statement identifying themselves and the assets, and the institution holding the property (a bank, a DMV, a brokerage) releases it. The whole thing can sometimes wrap up in weeks.
The dollar threshold varies widely. Some states set it as low as $15,000 to $25,000; others allow estates worth up to $200,000 in personal property. Most fall somewhere in the $50,000 to $100,000 range. The threshold usually applies only to the probate estate, so assets that transfer automatically through beneficiary designations or joint ownership don’t count against the limit. Real property is sometimes excluded from the affidavit process or handled under a separate, lower threshold.
The simplified process cuts the paperwork, not the underlying obligations. Debts still get paid before distributions, and an heir who signs an affidavit and collects assets while ignoring valid creditor claims can be held personally liable.