UK Letter of Wishes | Guide Your Executors

A letter of wishes is a written statement addressed to your executors, and where your will creates a trust, to your trustees. It records the preferences and background reasoning you want them to weigh when they carry out your instructions. It is deliberately informal in tone but precise in purpose. Unlike your will, it does not dispose of your estate and it does not need two witnesses, a solicitor, or any prescribed form of words. You simply write it, sign it and date it.

The distinction people miss is the one between binding and guiding. Your will is legally binding: if it says your house passes to your daughter, your executors must transfer the house to your daughter. A letter of wishes carries no such force. Your trustees ought to take it into account, and in practice they almost always follow it, but they are free to depart from it if circumstances demand. That flexibility is the whole point. It lets you speak to matters that would be clumsy, premature or simply too personal to freeze into a formal deed. If you want a genuinely enforceable gift of a specific asset, that belongs in your UK last will and testament template, not here. The letter of wishes is the companion that explains the will, softens it, and makes it easier to administer.

A letter of wishes has no single governing statute because its defining feature is that it is not a testamentary instrument. It falls outside the formalities of the Wills Act 1837, which is precisely why it needs no witnesses and can be revised freely. Its legal weight comes instead from the law of trusts and the duties of fiduciaries. Where your will establishes a discretionary trust, your trustees are under a duty to consider all relevant matters when exercising their powers, and a letter of wishes is treated by the courts as a legitimate and relevant expression of the settlor's intentions. It informs the exercise of discretion without fettering it.

Two consequences follow, and both matter in practice. First, the letter must never contradict the will. Where the two conflict, the will prevails as the binding document, and the inconsistency simply creates the confusion you were trying to avoid. Draft the letter to illuminate the will, not to rewrite it. Second, confidentiality is real but not absolute. A letter of wishes does not enter the public record on a grant of probate, unlike the will itself, which is why families use it for sensitive explanations. Yet a disappointed beneficiary can sometimes force disclosure, and where a solicitor drafted the will, a Larke v Nugus request may bring the letter into the open. Write nothing you could not defend if it were read aloud in a mediation.

The most instructive cautionary tale is the estate of Diana, Princess of Wales, where a letter of wishes asked that godchildren receive a quarter of her personal chattels. Because the letter was not binding, the executors were entitled to depart from it, and the godchildren ultimately received a single item each. The lesson is blunt: if a wish truly matters, put the mechanism in the will and use the letter to explain the why. For an authoritative overview of what a will can and cannot do, the GOV.UK official guidance on making a will sets out the formal requirements the letter is designed to sit beside. Guardianship guidance in the letter draws its force from section 5 of the Children Act 1989, the provision under which testamentary guardians are appointed.

The clearest trigger is a will that leaves assets on discretionary trust, whether for children, grandchildren or a vulnerable beneficiary. Trustees handed wide powers and no guidance are being asked to guess, and guessing is how disputes start. A letter tells them who you really intended to benefit, in what circumstances, and at what pace. A parent might write that a child should not receive capital until twenty-five, or that university costs and a first-home deposit take priority over lump-sum payments. None of that binds the trustees, but it steers them decisively.

The second common situation is a blended family or any inheritance that looks uneven on paper. If you are leaving more to one child than another, or excluding someone entirely, an unexplained will invites a challenge. A calm, dated explanation of your reasoning is frequently what persuades a disappointed relative not to litigate, because contested probate is expensive and slow, and judges give weight to a testator's contemporaneous account of their own intentions.

Funeral and personal wishes make up the third category. Burial or cremation, a humanist or religious service, where ashes should be scattered, who should be told of your death and, sometimes, who should not. These are matters families desperately want certainty on within days of a death, long before the will is even read.

An edge case worth flagging: where you have appointed a guardian for minor children, a separate note to that guardian about upbringing, schooling and religion is invaluable, and it is legally distinct from any letter addressed to your trustees about money. A child travel consent letter handles day-to-day permissions while you are alive; the letter of wishes speaks to what happens after. A second edge case: if you hold assets through a company or partnership, note where the succession documents live, because executors routinely waste weeks hunting for paperwork nobody catalogued.

• The opening cross-reference to your will ties the letter to a specific dated will and states expressly that it is not binding and must not override that will. This single paragraph prevents the letter from ever being mistaken for a codicil and is the sentence that keeps the two documents working together rather than against each other.
• The funeral and body disposal wishes cover burial or cremation, the style of service, music and readings, and the destination of any ashes. Because families act on these within days, the clause is drafted to be found and understood immediately, without legal interpretation.
• The guidance to trustees on discretionary distributions is the heart of the document. It sets out which beneficiaries you would prioritise, the ages or milestones at which you would want capital released, and the purposes, education, housing, health, you consider most important. It speaks in the language of preference, never command, so it guides discretion under trust law without fettering it.
• The personal items and sentimental gifts paragraph lists chattels and their intended recipients, jewellery, watches, furniture, photographs, with enough description to avoid arguments. These are wishes, not binding gifts, so anything you cannot bear to see redirected belongs in the will instead.
• The explanation of controversial or unequal decisions gives you space to record, calmly and in your own words, why an estate is divided as it is. This is the clause that most often defuses a threatened claim.
• The note to guardians of minor children conveys your hopes for their upbringing, education and religious formation, kept separate from financial guidance to trustees, and framed around section 5 of the Children Act 1989.

You begin by confirming the details of the will this letter accompanies, its date and the fact that it remains in force, so the two documents are unmistakably linked. From there the template moves through funeral preferences, then guidance to your executors and trustees, then personal items, then any explanations you wish to leave, and finally a note to guardians if you have young children. Each section is optional, so you complete only what applies to you and leave the rest out cleanly rather than padding the letter with empty headings.

The tone throughout should stay in the language of preference. You are writing "I would like" and "I hope my trustees will", not "my trustees must", because command language risks turning a flexible note into something a court reads as an attempted variation of the will. Once the content is complete, you sign and date the letter in your own hand. No witnesses are required, though a date is essential because a later letter supersedes an earlier one. Store it physically alongside your will, and tell your executors where both documents are kept. If you later reorganise other affairs, such as recording who holds your health and welfare lasting power of attorney, update the letter so everything stays consistent.

The most damaging error is contradicting the will. People write a letter months or years after the will, forget precisely what the will says, and leave an item to one person in the will and another in the letter. The will wins every time, and the letter has achieved nothing except confusion at the worst possible moment. Read the two side by side before you sign. A close cousin of this mistake is treating the letter as a substitute for the will: leaving a valuable asset "by letter" in the belief it is enough. It is not binding, and the Diana estate shows exactly how that ends. If it matters, it goes in the will.

The second cluster of errors is about carelessness rather than substance. An undated letter is worse than none, because nobody can tell which version is current. A letter locked in a bank vault your executors cannot access for weeks defeats its own purpose, especially for funeral wishes that are needed within days. Writing something you would be embarrassed to have disclosed is risky given that confidentiality can break down under a Larke v Nugus request. And finally, forgetting to revisit the letter after a birth, death, marriage or divorce leaves your trustees acting on instructions that no longer reflect your family. Note too that marriage generally revokes a will, and a fresh will means the accompanying letter should be rewritten to match. If your estate includes a private debt owed to you, a loan agreement between individuals recorded properly will save your executors far more trouble than a vague mention in the letter.