What Happens to Your Digital Assets When You Die?

Most of us have spent years building a life online without ever stopping to think about what happens to it when we are gone. Your photographs are in the cloud. Your bank statements arrive by email. Your Netflix account auto-renews. Your Facebook profile exists. Your PayPal balance sits there. And somewhere, perhaps, you have a few hundred pounds worth of cryptocurrency that only you know the password to.

None of this existed when traditional Will templates were written. And for a long time, UK law had very little to say about any of it.

That has now changed.

A New Law That Every Will Needs to Reflect

In December 2025, the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 became law in England and Wales. For the first time, digital assets - including cryptocurrency, email accounts and other electronically held assets - are formally recognised as personal property. This matters because it gives executors clearer legal authority to identify, access and deal with digital assets as part of settling an estate.

It is an important step forward, but the law alone cannot solve the more immediate problem: most people have no plan for their digital assets at all. A recent survey found that only one in ten UK adults has made any arrangements for who would inherit their digital assets. Among people aged 55 and over, that figure falls to just one in twenty. And almost a fifth of adults say they have never even thought about it.

That is a significant gap, and it is one that the team at Claire Nash Solicitors can help you with.

What Counts as a Digital Asset?

The term covers more than most people realise. Your digital estate might include:

Financial assets

Online bank accounts, PayPal or similar payment platform balances, cryptocurrency holdings, shares held through an investment app, loyalty points and air miles with cash value.

Sentimental assets

Photographs stored in iCloud or Google Photos, videos, personal emails, digitised family records and documents.

Social media accounts

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and others. These accounts do not disappear automatically when someone dies. Without instructions, they can remain active indefinitely or be memorialised, depending on the platform.

Subscriptions and accounts

Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, and gaming accounts. These cannot usually be inherited because they are licences rather than owned assets, but they need to be cancelled.

Income-generating assets

Websites, YouTube channels, online businesses, digital content libraries. These can have real financial value and need to be properly accounted for in an estate.

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency deserves particular attention. Bitcoin and other digital currencies can be worth significant sums and are subject to inheritance tax. But unlike a bank account, there is no customer service number to call and no way to reset a forgotten password. Without the relevant private keys or seed phrase, the funds are gone permanently, regardless of what your Will says or what authority your executor holds. If you also lose mental capacity before you have shared this information with anyone, even a family member acting under a Lasting Power of Attorney, may be unable to help. This is an area where advance planning is not just sensible, it is essential.

The Problem Your Executor Will Face

When someone dies, the executor's job is to locate and collect all the assets of the estate. In the past, this meant going through filing cabinets and contacting banks. Today, it means navigating a digital world that was never really designed with death in mind.

Most online platforms require account holders to be alive. Logging in using a deceased person's credentials technically breaches their terms of service, even if you are the executor and have legal authority to manage the estate. Getting access through official channels - providing a death certificate and grant of probate - can take weeks and is not guaranteed to succeed.

If someone dies without leaving a record of their online accounts, passwords and digital assets, their executor is left to piece it together with very little to go on. Families can lose access to irreplaceable photographs, fail to recover financial assets they did not know existed, and face HMRC complications if cryptocurrency or other taxable digital assets go unaccounted for.

What You Can Do Now

Create a digital inventory. List every online account you hold, what it contains, and whether it has any financial or sentimental value. You do not need to include passwords in this document - and for security reasons, it is better if you don’t - but your executor needs to know what exists. Keep it somewhere safe and tell someone trusted where it is.

Check platform-specific tools. Some platforms allow you to nominate a legacy contact or inactive account manager who can access or close your account after your death. Facebook, Google and Apple all have versions of this. Take ten minutes to set them up.

Include digital assets in your Will. A Will written more than a few years ago almost certainly makes no mention of digital assets. If you have cryptocurrency, online investments or income-generating digital accounts, these need to be addressed explicitly. The new legislation makes it easier for executors to deal with them legally, but only if they know they exist.

Think carefully about cryptocurrency. If you hold cryptocurrency, your private key or seed phrase is the only way to access it. Without it, the funds are gone permanently, regardless of your Will, your executor's authority or the new legislation. This needs to be handled with care, stored securely and communicated to someone who can act on it after your death.

Review your Will. If you have not looked at your Will recently, now is a good time. The world looks very different from the one it was written in, and your digital life is part of your estate whether your Will reflects that or not.

A Conversation Worth Having

This is not a complicated area of law, but it does require some thought and a Will that reflects modern life. If your current Will was written several years ago, or if you have not yet made one, the question of what happens to your digital assets when you die is a good reason to revisit it.

At Claire Nash Solicitors, we take a holistic approach to Will writing. We ask the questions that other solicitors might not think to ask, including the ones about your online accounts, your digital photographs and the things that matter to you in ways that do not fit neatly into a traditional estate.

If you would like to talk to us about updating your Will or making one for the first time, our team in Crowborough would be glad to help. We offer flexible appointments, including evenings and home visits, and we are always happy to have an initial conversation before you commit to anything.

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