Marriage Revokes a Will

Buried in section 85 of the Succession Act is a rule that rewrites estates while nobody watches: marriage revokes a prior will — automatically, silently, at the ceremony — unless the will was made in contemplation of that marriage. No warning attaches, no formality intervenes, and families discover it decades later, standing over an estate governed by a document that legally died at a wedding.

The Rule and Its One Exception

The mechanism is total: the subsequent marriage (or civil partnership) revokes the will, and unless a new will followed, the estate passes on intestacy’s fixed map — with its spousal shares pointing much of everything at the new spouse. The exception: a will made in contemplation of the particular marriage survives it — cleanest where the document says so on its face, arguable from circumstances where it doesn’t, and exactly the analysis a specialist read settles. The asymmetry completes the trap: divorce and separation revoke nothing — marriage kills wills silently, endings preserve them silently, and the law tells nobody either way.

The Estates It Catches

The recurring casualties: the later-life marriage — the decades-old will favouring first-family children dies at the second wedding, and intestacy redirects the estate toward the new spouse, converting the blended-family collision from managed to maximal; and the long-engaged couple whose “sorted years ago” wills predate the eventual ceremony that revoked them both. For anyone examining an estate now, the discipline is mechanical: will date against marriage date, first — because if the will fell, every entitlement in the room recalculates: the spouse’s intestate share, children’s fixed portions, and the section 117 landscape all replace the dead document’s promises.

Issue One, Before Positions Form

This analysis reverses family expectations regularly — in both directions: the children relying on a revoked will, and equally the spouse unaware intestacy now favours them. It belongs at the very start, before anyone entrenches around a document that may be legally dead: the dates compared, the contemplation exception tested, the consequences mapped. One reading, one conversation — and everything after proceeds on the estate’s real legal footing. The formalities family this rule belongs to: invalid & lost wills.