What Happens If You Die Without A Will In New Hampshire?

Quick Summary

If you die without a will in New Hampshire, the state decides who gets your property. This is called dying intestate, and New Hampshire’s intestacy laws follow a fixed formula that has nothing to do with your wishes, your relationships, or your family’s actual circumstances. Your assets go to your closest relatives in a legally defined order, whether or not that’s what you would have chosen.

New Hampshire’s Intestacy Laws: Who Gets What

New Hampshire uses a statutory formula for distributing assets when someone dies without a will. The basic structure works like this:

If you’re married with no children, your spouse gets everything.

If you’re married with children who are also your spouse’s children, your spouse gets everything.

If you’re married but have children from a prior relationship, your spouse gets your personal property, $250,000, and half of any remaining assets. Your children from the prior relationship split the other half.

If you’re single with children, your children inherit everything equally.

If you’re single with no children, assets pass to your parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives.

Notice what’s not in that list: unmarried partners, stepchildren, close friends, charities, or anyone who isn’t a blood relative or legal spouse. New Hampshire intestacy law doesn’t care how long you’ve lived with someone or how important they are to you. It follows the formula.

The Blended Family Problem

This is where intestacy law does the most damage. Southern New Hampshire has a significant number of blended families, second marriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, unmarried co-parents. The intestacy formula doesn’t adapt to any of that.

Consider a father in Milford who has two biological children and two stepchildren he’s raised for 15 years. His wife is their mother, but his stepchildren are her children from her first marriage, legally. He dies without a will. Under NH intestacy law, his biological children inherit. His stepchildren, the ones he coached, drove to practice, and helped with homework, get nothing from his estate. Not legally. Not automatically.

Or consider an unmarried couple in Amherst who’ve lived together for 12 years. One partner dies. Without a will naming the other as beneficiary, the surviving partner has no automatic claim to anything. The house, the savings account, the furniture, it all goes to blood relatives who may have been barely present in that person’s life.

These aren’t hypothetical edge cases. They’re the situations that fill probate courts across Hillsborough County every year.

What Happens To Minor Children?

If you have minor children and die without a will in New Hampshire, a judge decides who becomes their guardian. The court will consider the best interests of the child, but they are not bound by your preferences, because you didn’t express any. You had no will.

Beyond guardianship, any assets your minor children inherit don’t just flow to them. Minor children can’t legally manage property. A court-appointed conservator must manage those assets until the child turns 18. At 18, they receive everything at once, in full, with no conditions, no trust structure, no guidance. If you would have wanted that money to fund education, or to be distributed gradually, the intestacy default doesn’t do any of that.

A will lets you name a guardian you trust. A trust, paired with a will, lets you set terms for when and how your children receive their inheritance. Without either, you’ve handed those decisions to a court.

What Goes Through Probate In New Hampshire?

Not every asset passes through a will, or through intestacy. Assets with named beneficiaries (life insurance policies, retirement accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs) pass directly to those beneficiaries regardless of whether a will exists. Joint tenancy property transfers to the surviving owner automatically. Payable-on-death and transfer-on-death accounts also bypass probate.

What remains, and what gets distributed by the intestacy formula, is your probate estate: real property in your name alone, bank accounts without beneficiary designations, personal property, and investment accounts without transfer-on-death designations. For many NH families, that still includes their home and a significant portion of their savings.

One of the first things an estate planning attorney at Sowerby & Moustakis Law will do is audit what you own and how it’s titled, then show you exactly how things would flow, both with and without a plan. That audit alone tends to change how people see their situation.

Will Vs. Trust: Which Do You Actually Need?

A will controls your probate assets and lets you name a guardian for minor children. A revocable living trust can go further, avoiding probate entirely and providing ongoing management of assets according to your terms. Which one fits your situation depends on your family structure, the value and type of your assets, and your goals.

For a detailed breakdown, see our article on will vs. trust in New Hampshire: which one do you actually need. The short version: most NH families with a home, minor children, or a blended family situation benefit from having both, a trust for their major assets and a pour-over will as a safety net.

And if elder law and Medicaid planning is also on your radar, the conversation gets broader fast. See what Medicaid asset protection planning means for New Hampshire families for how these pieces connect.

Talk To Sowerby & Moustakis Law

A will is one of the most direct things you can do for your family. It tells the state exactly what you want. Without it, the state decides. For families in Amherst, Nashua, Milford, and throughout southern New Hampshire, that default is rarely the right outcome.

Call Sowerby & Moustakis Law at (603) 249-5925, email info@smlpllc.com, or visit our contact page.