2026-09-21 · 16 min read

What counts as digital assets in a will (and what doesn't)

Digital assets in a will: which ones you can actually leave behind, which are personal licenses that die with you, and where your passwords should live.

A digital asset, in the law that governs this, is an electronic record in which an individual has a right or interest — a right in a record, which is narrower than owning what the record contains. That definition splits your digital life into three tiers: property a will can genuinely give away (crypto, domains, files you authored), licenses that are personal to you and transfer to nobody, and accounts where a will can only appoint someone with authority to act. A blanket clause reading "I leave all my digital assets to X" is therefore partly inoperative on the day it is read.

What does "digital assets" mean in a will?#

The everyday meaning of the phrase — everything in my accounts — is wider than the legal one. RUFADAA, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, attaches to your interest in the record, and then hands most of the real power back to the platform: a fiduciary's authority over a digital asset is subject to the applicable terms of service, and the act expressly does not give a fiduciary or designated recipient any new or expanded rights other than those held by the user.

That second clause is the whole game. Your will cannot grant more than you held. If you held a non-transferable personal license, that is what your beneficiary inherits: nothing.

Which of your digital things can a will actually give away?#

Tier	Examples	What you hold	Can a will transfer it?
1. Owned property	Crypto and other private-key assets, domain registrations, photos and writing you authored, revenue-generating accounts and the business entity behind them	Property or a contractual right that is assignable	Yes — this is real devisable estate property
2. Personal licenses	Purchased ebooks, music, films, app and game libraries	A non-transferable license for personal, non-commercial use	No — the license does not survive the holder
3. Access and control	Email, social accounts, cloud storage	A right of access under terms of service	Only the authority to act, never the account itself

Tier 1: property a will can genuinely leave to someone#

Crypto. The IRS treats virtual currency as property, and general tax principles applicable to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency. Nothing stops a will from devising it. What stops a beneficiary is the key: a private key that nobody can find makes the bequest unenforceable in the most literal way — there is no registrar, no custodian and no court that can reissue it. A clause without a key-location document leaves a number on paper and nothing behind it.

Domains. Registering a name creates a contract with a registrar, and ICANN's change-of-registrant policy assumes registrations can move between registrars and between registrants. Assignable, unlike a media license. Two practical notes for whoever handles it. First, under ICANN's Transfer Policy, after 1 December 2016, registrars must impose a lock that will prevent any transfer to another registrar for sixty (60) days following a change to a registrant's information — registrars may, but need not, offer an opt-out requested before the change. Second, GoDaddy releases a deceased holder's domains only to the estate administrator, and only on four items: the completed "Regain Access To My Account" form naming the administrator as requester, legal documentation identifying the administrator, a copy of the death certificate, and government-issued photo ID. GoDaddy says it may take up to 72 hours before the first correspondence; it does not publish a completion time. Plan for the renewal date to arrive before the paperwork clears.

Files you made. Copyright vests initially in the author or authors of the work, and § 201(d)(1) says ownership of a copyright may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession. Your photographs, code, music and manuscripts are owned outright, and for work created on or after 1 January 1978 the term runs for the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death — a catalogue that keeps producing rights and royalties for decades.

Tier 2: licenses that transfer to nobody#

This is where most "I leave my library to my daughter" clauses quietly fail.

Apple: apps in the App Store are licensed, not sold, to you, you may not transfer, redistribute or sublicense the Licensed Application except as expressly permitted, and you may use the services and content only for personal, noncommercial purposes. iCloud's terms are blunter, under a heading called No Right of Survivorship: except as allowed under Digital Legacy and unless otherwise required by law, you agree that your Account is non-transferable and that any rights to your Account or Content within your Account terminate upon your death.
Amazon: Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider, and the Kindle Store Terms of Use bar you from selling, renting, leasing, distributing, sublicensing or otherwise assigning any rights to that content to a third party.
Steam: your account is strictly personal and you may not sell, charge for or otherwise transfer it; the content and services are licensed, not sold, and your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. Steam Wallet funds do not constitute a personal property right and are non-transferable. Asked directly, Steam Support answered: "your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will".

California put a statute behind the point. AB 2426, signed 24 September 2024 and effective 1 January 2025, makes it unlawful for a seller of a digital good to advertise or offer for sale a digital good to a purchaser with the terms "buy," "purchase," or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest — unless the seller obtains an affirmative acknowledgment or gives a clear and conspicuous license disclosure before the transaction. It defines a digital good as a digital audiovisual work, digital audio work, digital book, digital code, or digital application or game. Amazon changed its US checkout wording to "you're purchasing a license to the content". The seller now states the tier for you, at the moment of sale.

Tier 3: accounts where a will appoints, not transfers#

Email, social and cloud accounts are access rights. Yahoo's position is that all Yahoo accounts are non-transferable, even when the account owner is deceased; it will not hand over passwords, and on a reviewed request with a death certificate it will close the account and stop billing. Getting at the content inside is a separate and harder ask, requiring further documentation including a court order.

Apple's Digital Legacy reaches photos, messages, notes, files and device backups, but explicitly not movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain — payment information, passwords and passkeys stay sealed. A Legacy Contact also needs two things to make a request: the access key generated in advance, and a death certificate (some countries require a different document).

So the drafting goal in tier 3 is not ownership. It is a named person holding documented authority and documented consent before the custodian is ever contacted.

How do you include digital assets in a will?#

Four moving parts, and they live in different places on purpose.

Name a digital fiduciary in the will, and say what you want them to do with each tier. Choosing that person is its own decision with its own failure modes — see how to name a digital executor for the criteria that matter.
Grant explicit consent to disclosure of content. Under RUFADAA, a custodian discloses the content of electronic communications to a deceased user's personal representative only on a written request supported by a certified death certificate, a certified copy of the letters of appointment, and — unless the user used an online tool — a copy of the will, trust or other record evidencing the user's consent to disclosure.
Point to an external inventory. The will says where the list lives. It does not contain the list.
Set the platform tools separately, because they outrank the document you just signed.

What should a digital assets clause say?#

Sample language, not legal advice; state law governs and an attorney in your state should adapt it.

Digital assets. I appoint [name] as my digital fiduciary, with authority over my digital assets as defined by the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act as enacted in my state. I give my lawful consent, under 18 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(3) and any successor provision, to the disclosure to my fiduciary of the content of my electronic communications, the catalogue of those communications, and any other digital asset held by any custodian. My digital assets are listed in a separate written inventory titled [title], kept at [location] and updated from time to time. That inventory is not incorporated into this will, and no password, private key, recovery phrase or account number appears in this will.

The consent sentence is doing specific work. The federal Stored Communications Act says a provider of electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication while in electronic storage by that service, with a parallel bar on remote computing services — and the exception your clause is aiming at is disclosure with the lawful consent of the originator or an addressee or intended recipient of such communication, or the subscriber in the case of remote computing service. In Ajemian v. Yahoo!, Inc., 478 Mass. 169 (2017), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that the Act does not prohibit a provider from voluntarily disclosing a decedent's email contents to the personal representatives of the estate, because the representatives may give lawful consent on the decedent's behalf. Note the limit of that holding: it permits disclosure, it does not compel it. Written consent turns a provider's "we can't" into a paperwork step.

If you are working from a digital assets will template, check it for exactly these: a named fiduciary, an explicit § 2702 consent sentence, a pointer to an external inventory, and a statement that credentials are not in the document.

Should you put passwords in your will?#

No, and the reason is filing, not security theory. A will is private until it is filed — then, as the New York courts' law-library guidance states, once the Will is admitted to probate or a small estate, it becomes a public document that anyone can see and read, with filings viewable online through WebSurrogates. California superior courts run comparable public portals; Santa Clara County's, for instance, lets the public search and view information for civil, criminal, family, probate, and other case types, with availability of the underlying documents varying by case type and by law. A seed phrase written into a will is a seed phrase handed to a court file.

So split the two jobs. The will grants authority; a separate, secure, updatable inventory holds the credentials. The split also solves a second problem — amending a will takes witnesses and formality, while your master password changes on a Tuesday afternoon.

Where do seed phrases and recovery codes belong?#

In the updatable document, described by location rather than value: which wallet, which hardware device, which drawer or safe deposit box, which password manager, and who holds the master credential. This is the layer Proceedly is built for — a check-in you answer on a schedule, a named person who confirms when you go silent past the grace window (or automatic release on a paid plan), and an encrypted handoff plan that holds your instructions and where the keys live, never the passwords themselves.

Do platform settings override your will?#

Yes, and this surprises people who just paid for a will. Under RUFADAA's user-direction provision, if the online tool allows the user to modify or delete the direction at all times, a direction regarding disclosure using an online tool overrides a contrary direction by the user in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record.

Tool	What it does	What it does not do
Apple Legacy Contact	Grants photos, messages, notes, files and device backups on an access key plus death certificate	No purchased movies, music, books or subscriptions; no iCloud Keychain payment information, passwords or passkeys
Google Inactive Account Manager	Lets you select up to 10 people to be notified after an inactivity period you set, and sends them a list of the data you chose to share plus a link to download it	Does not stop Google reserving the right to delete an account inactive across Google for at least two years
Facebook legacy contact	On memorialization, can pin a post, respond to friend requests, update the profile photo, and download an archive if you enabled it	Cannot log in as you, cannot read your messages, and cannot remove friends or past posts

Set these yourself, inside each account. Your attorney has no way to do it for you, and the will cannot reach past them.

What does RUFADAA add?#

It gives your fiduciary a legal route and a clock. A custodian must comply not later than 60 days after receipt of the required information, and if it does not, the fiduciary or designated recipient may petition the court for an order directing compliance. One scoping limit worth knowing: RUFADAA does not apply to a digital asset of an employer used by an employee in the ordinary course of the employer's business.

Adoption is close to universal — commonly reported as roughly 48 states plus the District of Columbia, with Delaware still on the earlier 2014 UFADAA — but the circulating counts disagree with each other and several are years out of date. Rather than trust a copied number, check your own state against the Uniform Law Commission's legislative activity reports, which list the enacting bill and effective date state by state.

What changed in California with SB 1458?#

SB 1458 was approved by the Governor and chaptered on 27 September 2024, amending Probate Code §§ 871, 872, 880 and 881 and adding §§ 879.1, 879.2 and 879.3, effective 1 January 2025. Section 871 now defines a fiduciary as an original, additional, or successor personal representative, conservator, agent, or trustee — an agent being an attorney-in-fact granted authority over financial matters under a power of attorney, and a conservator a court-appointed manager of a living person's estate. Custodians must now disclose digital assets and communication catalogues to agents and conservators under the conditions the new sections specify. The practical shift: in California the gap during incapacity is covered, not only the one after death.

What does the six-step pass look like?#

Inventory. List accounts, wallets, domains and creative files by name and location, not by password.
Sort into tiers. Mark each line owned, licensed, or access-only. Stop planning bequests of tier 2.
Set the online tools. Apple Legacy Contact (generate and store the access key), Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook legacy contact. These beat the will.
Draft the clause. Named fiduciary, § 2702(b)(3) consent, pointer to the inventory, explicit statement that no credentials appear in the will.
Store credentials separately. Encrypted, updatable, and reachable by the person you named — with a release condition you control.
Review annually. A changed registrar, a new wallet, a moved master password. An inventory two years stale is a list of dead ends with your name on it.

FAQ: what else do people ask?#

Can I just write "I leave all my digital assets to my spouse"? Part of it will work. The crypto, domains and copyrights pass. The Kindle, Apple and Steam libraries do not, because RUFADAA gives a fiduciary no new or expanded rights beyond yours, and yours was a personal license. The accounts themselves pass to nobody; the clause only appoints someone to deal with them.

Can my executor sell my Kindle books or Steam games? No. The Kindle Store Terms of Use bar assigning any rights in the content to a third party, and Steam Support has said in writing that Steam accounts and games are non-transferable and cannot pass by will.

Does a will cover my iCloud photo library? Only through Digital Legacy, and only if you set it up. iCloud's own terms say the Account is non-transferable and that any rights to your Account or Content within your Account terminate upon your death, except as allowed under that programme, and the Legacy Contact needs the pre-generated access key.

What if a platform ignores my executor? RUFADAA sets a 60-day compliance deadline running from receipt of the required documents, after which the fiduciary can petition a court for an order directing compliance.

Do my work accounts count? Generally not for RUFADAA purposes — the act excludes a digital asset of an employer used by an employee in the ordinary course of the employer's business. Handle those through the employer.

Is a digital assets will template enough? Only if it contains the four load-bearing parts: named fiduciary, explicit disclosure consent, external inventory pointer, and no credentials. State law governs the rest, so have an attorney in your state review it.

Sources: where do these rules come from?#

This article is general information, not legal advice. Digital asset law is state law, and your state's enactment of RUFADAA — plus the terms of service of every custodian you use — controls the outcome.