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Family & Estate Law by State
What happens to a house, a bank account, and everything else when someone dies without a will. Every state has already written that will for you; these pages show you what it says.
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Each topic opens a state-by-state hub; every figure inside is cited to the official statute.
How dying without a will actually plays out
Dying without a valid will is called dying intestate, and it does not mean the state takes your property. It means the probate court distributes the estate by a fixed statutory formula instead of by anyone's wishes. The formula turns on family shape: whether there is a surviving spouse, whether the children are also the spouse's children, and whether parents or siblings are still alive. A spouse might take everything in one state and share with the children next door, and stepchildren usually take nothing at all.
One split matters more than any other. In community property states, most of what a couple earned during the marriage already belongs half to the survivor before the intestacy formula even starts; in the rest of the country the formula divides a larger pot. Because the outcome depends on scenario, each state page here is built around the common ones (spouse and shared children, spouse and children from a prior relationship, no spouse, no children) with the share each heir takes, cited to the state's intestacy statute.