Bona vacantia: what happens to estates nobody claims

Most people assume that when somebody dies without a will, the state eventually takes the lot. In England and Wales that is roughly true, but the route the money travels is far odder than the assumption suggests, and along the way it has spawned a genuine commercial industry of researchers who race government lawyers to find the heirs first.

The legal starting point is intestacy. The Administration of Estates Act 1925 sets out a strict ladder of relatives entitled to inherit when there is no valid will: spouse or civil partner, then children and their descendants, then parents, full siblings, half siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and finally half aunts and half uncles, with the descendants of each class standing in for members who died earlier. The ladder stops there. A first cousin can inherit; a second cousin, a great-nephew by marriage or a devoted friend of forty years cannot. If nobody on the ladder can be found, the estate is declared bona vacantia — literally "ownerless goods" — and passes to the Crown.

Collecting it is the job of the Bona Vacantia Division of the Government Legal Department, which administers unclaimed estates on the Treasury's behalf and publishes a list of them online, updated every working day. The list typically carries several thousand names at a time, each entry showing little more than the deceased's name, dates, place of death and sometimes a place of birth or maiden name. Estates worth less than about £500 are generally not advertised at all, because the cost of administration would swallow them.

The publication of that list is what created the heir-hunting trade. Probate genealogy firms — Finders International and Fraser & Fraser are the best known, both fixtures of the BBC's long-running Heir Hunters — scrape the daily additions, and their researchers work backwards through birth, marriage and death indexes, census returns and electoral rolls to reconstruct a family tree before rivals do. When they locate a living cousin who has no idea the deceased existed, they offer to reveal the inheritance in exchange for a signed commission agreement, commonly between 10 and 25 per cent of whatever is recovered. The beneficiary is free to refuse and research the connection independently, though few know how. Speed matters commercially because there is nothing exclusive about the information: the first firm to sign the heirs wins.

The window for claims is generous. A qualifying relative can apply to the division within 12 years of the estate being administered and receive the money with interest, and the Crown will in practice entertain claims for up to 30 years from the date of death, albeit without interest. The division can also make discretionary, ex gratia grants out of an unclaimed estate to people outside the statutory ladder — a carer, a long-term companion, someone the deceased might reasonably have been expected to provide for — which is one of the few places in English property law where a moral claim, rather than a legal one, can move money.

The Duchy carve-outs

The genuinely strange part is geographical. If the deceased died within the historic county palatine of Lancaster, the estate does not go to the Treasury at all: it goes to the Duchy of Lancaster, the private estate held by the monarch as Duke of Lancaster. Die in Cornwall, and it goes to the Duchy of Cornwall, held by the heir apparent. These are medieval franchises that survived every modernising reform since, and they are administered separately by Farrer & Co, the duchies' solicitors, rather than by the Government Legal Department. Both duchies have long stated that net bona vacantia receipts, after costs and claims, are given to charity through their benevolent funds; reporting in 2023 and 2024 showed the Duchy of Lancaster had also been applying some of the money to repairing its own property portfolio, a practice it defended as permitted and then said it would wind down. Either way, the sums are material — the duchies collect millions of pounds a year between them from people who died without wills.

Scotland runs its own version under the doctrine of ultimus haeres, with unclaimed estates handled by the King's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer, and dissolved companies feed the same pipeline everywhere: assets still owned by a company when it is struck off the register become bona vacantia under the Companies Act 2006, which is how forgotten bank balances and even freehold land end up belonging to the Crown. The whole apparatus rests on a very old idea — that property must always belong to someone, and that the someone of last resort is the sovereign. What nobody in 1925 anticipated was that a daily government web page would turn that principle into a spectator sport with commission rates.