Why fewer Americans have a will than in 2022

Twenty-four percent of American adults have a will. In 2022 the figure was thirty-three percent. The decline landed during the exact stretch when estate-planning software got cheap, guided, and available on a phone at midnight. If price and access were the binding constraint, cheaper and easier tools would have moved the number up. The number went down nine points. That result rules out the explanation the whole category has been running on, and it points at a different constraint, one that sits much closer to the advisor than to the software.

The number is moving the wrong way

The Caring.com 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study, conducted with YouGov across more than 2,500 U.S. adults, puts will ownership at 24 percent. Living trusts sit at 13 percent. Any other estate-planning document accounts for 4 percent. Seventy-six percent of American adults have no will at all.

The trend line is the part worth sitting with. Caring.com has run this study annually, and the share of respondents with a will has fallen from 33 percent in 2022 to 24 percent in 2025.

One caveat on the data before building anything on it. This is a single annual panel survey rather than a government statistic, and there is no equally rigorous independent tracker to check it against. The AARP coverage that gets cited alongside it is itself sourced to an older Caring.com wave, so it corroborates nothing. Treat 24 percent as the best available figure from the most-cited annual tracker, not as a census.

The access paradox

Here is the structural claim, and it is falsifiable. In any market where the stated barrier is cost and access, falling cost and rising access should raise adoption. If adoption falls instead, the stated barrier was never the binding one.

Call it the access paradox. Between 2022 and 2025 the price of producing a legally valid will collapsed toward zero for the median household. Guided questionnaires replaced blank forms. Remote notarization expanded across most states. Every major consumer estate brand ran continuous acquisition marketing. On every axis the category said mattered, conditions improved. Adoption fell nine points.

The paradox does not prove that cost never mattered to anyone. It proves that cost was not the constraint holding the aggregate number down, because the aggregate number moved against the cost curve. Something else is binding, and the category has spent three years optimizing the wrong variable.

The conversation is already happening

The obvious next hypothesis is that nobody is raising the subject. That one also fails, and the disconfirming data comes from a competitor.

Trust & Will’s 2026 Financial Advisor Report, a June 2026 survey of 1,500 U.S. adults, found that 82 percent of advised clients report their advisor raised estate planning at least once. Sixty-eight percent would consider switching advisors to get estate planning as a service. Sixty-one percent think advisors should offer it. Demand is not the problem and neither is the opening question.

So among advised households, the topic gets raised four times out of five, the appetite is documented, the tools are cheap, and the completion rate still sits where it sits. Every input the category has been pulling on is already in the green.

The gap is after the conversation, not before it.

What households say when asked why not

The stated reasons are consistent across waves of this study and they are not economic. Ranked roughly by how often households give them:

• Procrastination. Some version of not having gotten around to it. This is consistently the largest single category and it is not a statement about willingness.
• An assets belief. Some version of not having enough to warrant the exercise, which tends to be held most firmly by households who have never seen their own balance sheet written down.
• Not knowing where to start. A sequencing problem rather than a knowledge problem. The household knows what a will is; it does not know what happens on Tuesday.
• Cost. Present, but well down the list, and falling further as the tools get cheaper. This is the one the category has spent three years solving.

Read those two answers as operational rather than attitudinal and they stop being excuses. "I have not gotten around to it" describes a task with no owner, no deadline, and no next physical step. "I do not have enough" describes a household that has never seen its own balance sheet laid out against what happens to each line at death. Both are descriptions of missing workflow, and workflow is the one thing a piece of self-serve software cannot supply, because self-serve software by definition hands the workflow back to the person who already did not have one.

That is the resolution of the paradox. Cheaper tools reduced the cost of the artifact. They did not reduce the coordination load, and the coordination load was the binding constraint the whole time.

Where the plan actually dies

Trace a motivated household from the conversation forward. The advisor raises estate planning in a review meeting. The household agrees it is overdue. Then: the accounts have to be inventoried, the old policy nobody has looked at since the rollover has to be found, the household has to decide who the successor trustee will be and ask that person, two witnesses and a notary have to be in one room on one date, and afterward every account has to be retitled and every beneficiary form filed so the documents govern anything at all.

Nine to fifteen separate actions across five to fifteen institutions, each with its own form and its own processing window. The household is not refusing. The household is stalled, at a step that has no owner.

Put numbers on one household. A married couple in their late fifties: two checking accounts, a joint savings, a taxable brokerage account, two IRAs, a 401(k) still sitting at a former employer, one term life policy, one small whole life policy nobody has reviewed since it was issued, a primary residence, and a quarter interest in a family LLC that holds a lake property. That is eleven funding actions and four beneficiary designations. The brokerage wants a certificate of trust in its own preferred format. The former-employer 401(k) routes beneficiary changes through a recordkeeper rather than the plan sponsor, so a form mailed to HR reaches nobody. The whole life carrier takes six weeks. The LLC interest cannot be assigned until the operating agreement’s transfer terms are confirmed by counsel, which means somebody first has to find the operating agreement and get it in front of the attorney.

Almost none of that is legal work, and the pieces that are route to the attorney. The rest is tedious, sequential, and easy to abandon at item four. A household attempting it alone on a Sunday afternoon gets through the two checking accounts and stops.

This is the same failure this journal has documented from the other end. Roughly half of revocable trusts are never fully funded even after a household has paid for one and signed it. The no-plan household and the unfunded-trust household are the same operational failure caught at different stages: work that requires sustained coordination, assigned to nobody, with no deadline attached.

What this changes for an advisory practice

If you have been treating estate planning as a referral you make and then wait on, the access paradox says that model is running against the trend. The referral hands the coordination load back to the household at exactly the step where households stall.

The move is to own the coordination rather than the recommendation. You are not the person who decides what instrument the household needs; the household selects through a guided questionnaire, and complex fact patterns route to a licensed attorney. What you own is everything operational around that, and the list is exactly this long: scheduling the intake, walking the household through their own asset inventory, putting a date on the signing meeting, arranging witnesses and a notary, and chasing the retitling and beneficiary forms afterward until each one closes.

None of that is legal work, which is what makes it available to you. The line and the language for staying on the right side of it are in our piece on what advisors can and cannot say, and the revenue the coordination layer supports is broken out in the estate-planning revenue stack.

How Bancroft handles the coordination load

The platform carries the operational layer the household cannot carry alone. The Asset Inventory captures every account, policy, and named person in one place, which turns the "I do not have enough" belief into a visible balance sheet the household can look at. The questionnaire runs the selection, with the household making every document choice and complex situations routing for $299 attorney review. Documents generate from attorney-reviewed templates in the supported state.

After signing, the Funding Letter Automation produces the retitling packet across six categories (bank, brokerage, retirement, life insurance, business interests, safe deposit) so the post-signing work arrives as a finite stack rather than an open-ended chore. The household marks each letter mailed, uploads proof to the Digital Safe, and a daily reminder cron chases whatever is still open. Amendments and restatements are free on every tier, which removes the fee wall that otherwise discourages keeping a plan current. The mechanics are on the funding letters page.

What the platform does not do is generate the household’s intent or supply the advisor’s follow-through. It removes the coordination load; somebody still has to put the meeting on a calendar.

The part this argument cannot close

The access paradox is well supported on the front half and thin on the back half. That cheaper tools failed to raise adoption is measured. That coordination load is the binding constraint is the best available reading of the stated reasons, and it is a reading rather than a measurement.

What would settle it is completion-rate data: of households where an advisor raised estate planning and the household said yes, what share reach a signed and funded plan, split by whether a coordinated workflow was in place. Nobody publishes that number. Bancroft does not have a defensible version of it yet either, and will not until enough households have run end to end on the platform to make the denominator mean something. Until then the honest position is that the front half is demonstrated and the back half is argued.

What is not in question is the direction. Twenty-four percent, down from thirty-three, in the years the tools got good. Whatever the category has been selling against, it has not been the thing keeping three-quarters of American households without a will.