Your crypto is now legally property: the Digital Assets Act 2025 (UK)
22 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
For years the honest answer to "what happens to my Bitcoin when I die" was a shrug and a legal argument. English law recognised two kinds of personal property, and a crypto-token didn't obviously fit either. That stopped being a problem on 2 December 2025.
The Act is about four lines long
The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 is one of the shortest laws you'll ever read. It says a thing can still be personal property even if it's neither a thing in possession nor a thing in action. Those are the old two boxes. One is something physical you can hold, the other is a right you enforce in court, like a debt. Crypto never sat comfortably in either. So the Act opens a third box and stops there. It doesn't define crypto, doesn't list which tokens count, and doesn't set up a register. It just removes the objection, exactly as the Law Commission recommended in its 2023 report on digital assets.
Why the category matters when someone dies
Property gets inherited. It falls into the residue of your estate if you haven't left it to anyone in particular. It can be held on trust, or gifted while you're alive. Your executor has a duty to gather it in and account for it. Something that isn't property sits in limbo, and limbo is where families lose things. Courts had already been treating crypto as property in freezing-order cases, but that was judges reasoning their way there each time. Now it's on the statute book. Nobody has to argue it from scratch.
It still won't help anyone find your keys
Worth being blunt here. Owning something in law and being able to reach it are two different problems. No seed phrase, no coins, and no Act of Parliament changes that. Worse, HMRC values crypto for inheritance tax at its market price on the date of death. That applies whether or not anyone can actually get at it. An estate can end up with a real tax bill on tokens sitting in a wallet nobody can open.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland only
The Act doesn't extend to Scotland. Scots law carves property up differently, corporeal and incorporeal, moveable and heritable, and never had quite the same gap to fill. If your estate is Scottish the practical advice below is identical. The legal plumbing underneath it just isn't this Act.
So the law has caught up, which is genuinely good news. It's also changed nothing about the thing that actually loses crypto: your executor not knowing it's there. Which exchanges, which wallets, custodial or self-custody, and where the recovery phrase lives. Written down somewhere they'll actually find it.
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is a digital inheritance vault. It holds every account, policy and instruction your family will need. It is locked so only you can read it, and passed to your executor only when it is needed.
Read more
- RUFADAA and digital assets: what happens to your online accounts when you die (US)
- Should you name a digital executor for your online accounts? (UK)
- Are digital wills legally valid in the UK yet?
- GDPR and digital legacy: does EU data protection law cover you after you die?
- Retiring or owning property in the EU: what happens to your estate if you die abroad