This is the least exciting page on the site and probably the most valuable. Losing access is the largest single cause of permanently lost Bitcoin, and a meaningful share of that is people who died with a perfectly secure setup that nobody else could open.
The awkward part is that good security and good inheritance pull in opposite directions. Everything that makes your keys hard for a stranger to find makes them hard for your family to find. Resolving that tension is the whole job.
The mistake that undoes everything
Do not put your seed phrase, private keys, passphrase or device PIN in your will.
In England and Wales, once a grant of probate is issued, the will becomes a public document that anyone can obtain a copy of. A will containing your recovery words is a published set of recovery words. The same applies to anything else that reveals how to reach your coins.
Your will should establish who inherits and give your executors authority to deal with digital assets. The instructions for how to reach them live somewhere else.
What goes where
- In the will: who receives what, and executors with explicit authority over digital assets.
- In a letter of wishes or private memorandum: that Bitcoin exists, roughly where the backups are, which devices are involved, and who to ask for help. Kept privately, not filed with probate.
- Nowhere written together: the seed phrase itself, and any passphrase. Those stay in their separate physical places, referenced but not reproduced.
The test is simple. Someone reading your letter of wishes should learn that Bitcoin exists and who can help them reach it. They should not be able to steal it from the letter alone.
Assume the person reading has never used Bitcoin, is grieving, and is being contacted by people offering to help who should not be trusted. Name a competent person to assist. Say plainly that no genuine helper ever needs the recovery words, because your family will be targeted precisely when they are least able to judge.
Where UK law now stands
Two things changed recently and both are worth knowing.
The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 received Royal Assent and came into force on 2 December 2025. It confirms in statute that something can be personal property even if it is neither a physical thing nor an enforceable right, which removes long-standing doubt about whether crypto-tokens count as property at all. That matters for inheritance, insolvency and theft claims. It applies to England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland has its own legal system and its own position.
Separately, the wider UK cryptoasset regime is arriving. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 passed in February 2026, the FCA published core final rules in June 2026, and the regime is expected to come into force in October 2027. If part of your holding sits with a UK service, expect the process your executors face to look more like dealing with a regulated firm over time.
None of this is legal advice, and this page is not a substitute for a solicitor. Crypto forms part of your estate for inheritance tax purposes, and getting the tax treatment right is a job for a qualified professional, not a website.
Practical structures
- The simple one: hardware wallet, metal backup in two separate secure locations, a letter of wishes explaining that both exist, and one named person competent to help. This covers most people properly.
- Splitting knowledge: the backup in one place, the information needed to locate and use it held by a different trusted person, so no single individual can act alone or lose everything.
- Multisig: requiring several keys held by different people or in different places. Genuinely robust, genuinely complex, and only sensible if everyone involved has rehearsed it. Level 3.
- A solicitor who understands this: increasingly available, and worth finding. Ask specifically how they handle access instructions without putting them in the will.
Capacity, not just death
Inheritance planning usually ignores the more likely scenario: you are alive but unable to manage your affairs. A Lasting Power of Attorney that explicitly covers digital assets lets someone you choose act for you. Without it, your family may face a considerably harder process at a considerably worse time.
The annual review
A plan written once and never revisited fails quietly. Devices get replaced, backups move house, passphrases change, executors fall out of touch. Once a year, check the plan still describes reality, confirm each backup is where it should be, and confirm your named helper is still willing and still knows what to do.
Put it in the calendar next to whatever else you review annually. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between a plan and a document.
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