Will requirements in Minnesota

Who can make a will in Minnesota

Minnesota asks for two things before a will counts: you need to be at least 18, and you need to be of sound mind when you sign. Sound mind is not a medical finding here. It means you can say, in your own words, roughly what you own, who your close family is, and that the paper in front of you is meant to direct where your things go.

Signing your will in Minnesota

1. 1You sign

   You sign the will, or someone signs it for you in your conscious presence and at your direction.

2. 2Two witnesses sign

   At least two witnesses sign as well, each within a reasonable time after watching you sign the will or hearing you acknowledge it as your own. No notary is needed for this step. Choose witnesses who inherit nothing under the will, so no gift can later be second-guessed.

3. 3The affidavit

   Optional, and worth adding anyway: a self-proving affidavit, sworn by you and your witnesses before an officer authorized to take oaths, usually a notary. With it attached, the court can accept your will later without tracking down either witness to testify.

Handwritten and electronic wills

Minnesota does not recognize a will that exists only in your own handwriting with no witnesses. However careful the penmanship, an unwitnessed document does not satisfy the state’s execution rule, which calls for the same two witnesses no matter how the will is written.

Where Minnesota moves further than most states is the opposite direction. Since August 2023, the law has made a fully electronic will legal, and it did that in an unusual way: rather than writing a separate set of rules just for electronic wills, the legislature rewrote what “writing” and “signing” mean throughout the probate code, so that an electronic, digital, or similar record now counts as writing, and an electronic mark applied with the intent to sign now counts as a signature, as long as the record can be shown not to have been altered after signing. The same two witnesses are still required either way. Myend keeps to the paper route regardless: you build your will online, then print and sign it with two witnesses, the form Minnesota, and every other state, has always accepted. See how Myend’s Last Will works.

Property and your spouse

Minnesota is a common law property state, so what you hold in your own name is yours to leave as you choose, not automatically split with a spouse the way it would be in a community property state. But a will alone cannot cut a spouse out entirely. If you are married, Minnesota gives a surviving spouse an elective share that grows with the length of the marriage, starting small in the first year and reaching up to half of the augmented estate once you have been married 15 years or more. Your spouse has to actively claim the share; it does not happen automatically, but the option stands no matter what your will says.

Your executor

Minnesota calls the person who carries out your will the executor. The state does not appear to place a residency requirement on who can serve, so you can generally name almost any capable adult, in Minnesota or out of state. New to the role? Start with what an executor actually does.

If someone challenges the will

Minnesota enforces no-contest clauses, the provisions that cut off anyone who challenges the will and loses. But the clause has a real limit: it is unenforceable against a challenge brought with probable cause, meaning a genuine, fact-based reason existed to raise it. The clause discourages baseless attacks. It does not punish an honest question.

If you do not make a will

Die without a will in Minnesota, and state law steps in to decide who inherits, working through a fixed list of relatives rather than anything you actually intended. A partner you never married, a stepchild you raised as your own, a close friend who mattered more than any cousin: none of them are on that list. Writing a will is how you put your own decisions ahead of the state’s default order. See what happens if you die without a will.

What is different about Minnesota

Minnesota will not take a will in your own handwriting, but it will take one you never printed at all.

Handwritten and electronic wills usually move in the same direction: a state relaxed enough to trust your penmanship without witnesses tends to be an early mover on digital signing too. Minnesota breaks that pattern. An unwitnessed will in your own hand carries no weight here, the same two witnesses are required no matter how the will is written. Yet since August 2023, an electronic will can carry exactly the same legal weight as a printed one.

What makes Minnesota’s version distinctive is how it got there. Other states that authorized electronic wills wrote a whole new statutory chapter for them, with its own execution rules. Minnesota instead rewrote the definitions its entire probate code already runs on: “writing” now reaches electronic and digital records, and “signing” now reaches an electronic mark made with the intent to sign. An electronic will is not treated as a special exception to the rules. It simply meets the same rule everyone else does, in a different medium, still with two witnesses watching.

Common questions

Sources and review