Will requirements in Virginia

Who can make a will in Virginia

Virginia asks two things of you: that you are at least 18, or an emancipated minor, and that you are of sound mind when you sign. Sound mind is a practical standard, not a medical diagnosis. It means you understand what you own, who your family is, and what your will does with what you leave them.

Signing your will in Virginia

1. 1You sign

   You sign, or direct someone to sign for you in your presence and by your direction.

2. 2Two witnesses sign

   Two competent witnesses, present at the same time, watch you sign or acknowledge the will, then sign it themselves in your presence. Choose adults who inherit nothing under the will; a disinterested witness keeps every gift safe from challenge.

3. 3The affidavit

   Optional but wise: the self-proving affidavit. You and your witnesses swear the affidavit before an officer authorized to take oaths, typically a notary, and the court can later accept your will without calling anyone to testify.

Handwritten and electronic wills

Virginia recognizes a will written entirely in your own handwriting. Signed by you, it is valid without a witnessed signing ceremony at all, but it is not unwitnessed forever: before it can be probated, the fact that it really is your handwriting and your signature has to be proved by at least two disinterested witnesses, people with no stake in the outcome. In practice that proof usually comes later, from someone who can recognize your hand, rather than from anyone present when you wrote it. A typed or printed will needs its two witnesses at the signing itself; a wholly handwritten will needs its two witnesses at proof. Both roads lead to the same two-witness floor, just at different moments.

Virginia has not authorized electronic wills. The document a court will accept is paper, signed the way described above. That is exactly how Myend’s Last Will works everywhere: you build the will online, then print and sign it with your witnesses, on paper, the form every state accepts.

Married in Virginia: the elective share

Because Virginia is a common-law property state, nothing you or your spouse earn during the marriage automatically becomes half-owned by the other, the way it would in a community-property state. The law’s answer is the elective share: if you are married, your spouse can set your will aside and claim a share of your combined estate no matter what the will says. The share is not fixed. It grows with the length of the marriage, from a small fraction in the earliest years to as much as half of the estate once you have been married fifteen years or more (Va. Code §§ 64.2-308.3(A), 64.2-308.4(B)). You can always leave your spouse more than the elective share. A will alone cannot leave them less.

Your executor

Virginia calls the person who carries out your will the executor. You can name almost any capable adult, whether they live in Virginia or somewhere else in the country entirely; Virginia does not require an out-of-state executor to appoint a local agent or post a bond just for living elsewhere. New to the role? Start with what an executor actually does.

If someone challenges the will

Virginia takes no-contest clauses seriously and enforces them largely as written. Virginia courts have declined to carve out a general good-faith exception the way some states do; if a beneficiary loses a challenge that a no-contest clause was written to prevent, they can lose the gift along with it. The rule comes from Virginia case law rather than a single statute, and courts still read a clause narrowly: it has to clearly describe what counts as a forfeiting challenge, or a court will not stretch it to cover a request that simply asks the court to interpret the will.

If you do not make a will

Without a will, Virginia’s intestate succession laws decide who inherits your estate, following a fixed order of relatives rather than your actual wishes. For blended families, unmarried partners, and close friends, that default order rarely lands where someone would have chosen for themselves. A valid will is how you replace the state’s formula with your own instructions. See what intestate means and how it differs from probate for how that default order works.

What is different about Virginia

Virginia trusts your handwriting, eventually. It trusts a long marriage more: the longer you stay married, the more of the estate a will alone cannot take away.

Two traits define this state. The holographic will is genuinely old law here: a document in your own hand, signed by you, needs no witnesses in the room at all, only two disinterested people willing to vouch for the handwriting once it matters, at probate. That is a real, distinct rule, not just a yes on a checklist; a witnessed, typed will and a wholly handwritten one satisfy Virginia’s two-witness floor at two different points in time.

The bigger structural fact sits with marriage. Virginia does not use a single flat elective-share fraction the way many states do. The share rises on a schedule tied to how long you were married: about 1.5 percent of the augmented estate for a marriage under a year, climbing step by step to 50 percent once a marriage reaches fifteen years (Va. Code §§ 64.2-308.3(A), 64.2-308.4(B)). The augmented estate is not just what passes through probate, either; it can reach certain property that never goes through a will at all. For a newly married couple and a couple married three decades, Virginia protects the surviving spouse very differently, and a will written without that schedule in mind can promise more, or less, than it can actually deliver.

Common questions

Sources and review