How many Americans have a will? What the surveys show

Two national surveys asked American adults, a few months apart, whether they have a will, and got answers thirteen points apart. Caring.com’s survey fielded in December 2020 with YouGov found 33 percent with a will or another estate-planning document. Gallup’s random telephone poll of 1,016 adults in May 2021 found 46 percent with a will, with a margin of error of four points. Neither source explains the gap, which most likely reflects the method and the wording of the question. An advisor who quotes either figure as the national number is quoting a survey design, and the two cannot be combined.

What each survey reports

Gallup has asked the same question four times since 1990: “Do you have a will that describes how you would like your money and estate to be handled after your death?” Its page reports the readings as ranging between 44 and 51 percent and describes them as similar; the 2021 poll is its most recent. The breakdowns are what an advisor can use. In 2021, 76 percent of adults 65 and older said they have a will, against 53 percent of those 50 to 64, 36 percent of those 30 to 49, and 20 percent of those under 30. By household income, 61 percent at $100,000 and above, 49 percent between $40,000 and $99,999, and 30 percent below $40,000.

Caring.com’s 2025 study, conducted with YouGov among more than 2,500 adults, found 24 percent with a will, 13 percent with a living trust, and 4 percent with another document; respondents could select more than one, so the figures do not add, and 56 percent reported no will or trust. Among respondents without a will, 43 percent said they “just haven’t gotten around to it,” and the page says the most common reasons are that planning is low on the to-do list and that respondents do not feel they have enough assets to leave anyone. Cost appears as a minority reason in the earlier waves: 13 percent of those without a will in the 2022 study said the process was too expensive, and 14 percent in 2023 cited the cost of creating a plan. Nearly a quarter of 2025 respondents said nothing would motivate them to begin.

Why the trend claim is weak

Caring.com’s 2025 page says the share of Americans with a will “has declined steadily from 33% of respondents in 2022.” Its own earlier pages do not support that sentence. The 2022 figure, 33 percent, counted respondents with “a will or living trust.” The 2023 page reported 34 percent with “an estate plan.” The 2024 page reported 32 percent and used “a will” and “an estate plan” for the same figure. The 2025 page reports 24 percent with a will and 13 percent with a living trust, on a question that allowed more than one answer. And the 2020 page, five years earlier, reported 23.9 percent with a will and 13 percent with a living trust, almost exactly the 2025 split. The definition moved between waves, and the will-only figure in 2025 looks like the will-only figure in 2020.

Gallup does not settle the question either way, because its latest reading is from 2021. What it offers is a question held constant for three decades with readings its page calls similar. So the honest version of the statistic is a range: somewhere between a quarter and a half of American adults have a will, depending on how the question is asked and who is asked, and the evidence for a recent decline rests on one survey whose definition changed.

What the surveys agree on

Both show the oldest and highest-income groups most likely to have a will, and both show the youngest adults and the lowest incomes least likely. Below 55 the picture is flatter than the headline suggests. Caring.com’s 2023 study found 26 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 and 27 percent of those 35 to 54 with an estate plan, against 46 percent of those 55 and older, and its 2021 page noted that the youngest group had, for the first time, overtaken the 35-to-54 group. The 2025 page adds two counts rather than rates: adults with children under 18 are the largest cohort without any estate-planning document, and the 35-to-54 band is the largest age group without one.

For an advisory firm, that points at a specific part of the book: households between their thirties and their mid-fifties, with accounts, a house, and often children, who have not signed anything. The reasons they give in these surveys are mostly not about price. “Haven’t gotten around to it” describes a task with no owner and no date.

Where a plan stalls

Consider a hypothetical household in that band. A married couple in their mid-forties: two checking accounts, a joint savings account, a taxable brokerage account, two IRAs, a 401(k) still with 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 assets. If the couple signs a revocable trust, six of them are candidates for retitling or assignment and five carry beneficiary designations to review. The brokerage wants a certification of trust. The former employer’s plan routes beneficiary changes through a recordkeeper, so a form mailed to the old HR office goes unanswered. The LLC interest should not be assigned before counsel has read the operating agreement, which means someone first has to find it.

Each of those is a request with an owner, a date, and a confirmation, and a plan stalls at whichever one has none. Why revocable trusts go unfunded after signing covers how to run those requests to completion, and how to run an estate-planning pilot covers how to measure a small group first.

Measure the book

A firm does not need the national figure. It needs its own: how many households have a completed plan on file, how many of those have open funding requests, how many have had their beneficiary designations reviewed in the last year, and how many households in the thirty-to-sixty band have nothing started. Those counts, taken from the firm’s records, describe the firm’s next year better than any survey, and they are the baseline a pilot is measured against.

• Cite a survey with its year, its sample, its method, and the exact question. Gallup asks about a will; Caring.com’s definition has varied by wave.
• Prefer the age and income breakdowns to the headline, and say which survey and year they come from.
• Do not compare a figure from one survey with a figure from another, and do not describe a decline that the survey’s own series contradicts.
• Track invited, started, completed, and funded households separately, and ask a stalled household what stopped it rather than inferring the reason.

How Bancroft handles it

The advisor’s dashboard counts households with documents in progress, in attorney review, and completed, and households with open funding tasks, and the household list filters on the same states and shows each household’s plan readiness. Each household’s own page lists its documents with their status and its trust-funding tab shows which letters are drafted, mailed, or confirmed. The household enters its own asset inventory, which is the list the couple above never made, and once its trust document is in place the platform drafts funding letters for the assets it marks for the trust. A review reminder goes to households whose plan is about a year old. To see the dashboard counts and a household’s funding tab for a sample book, book a demo.