Will requirements in Iowa

Who can make a will in Iowa

Iowa asks two things of you before a will can stand: you must be at least 18, and you must be of sound mind when you sign it. Iowa Code section 633.264 puts it plainly, any person of full age and sound mind may dispose of their property by will. Sound mind is a practical bar, not a medical one. You need to know roughly what you own, who your family is, and what your will actually does with both.

Signing your will in Iowa

1. 1You sign

   You sign the will yourself, or direct someone else to write your name for you, in your presence and at your request.

2. 2Two witnesses sign

   Two competent witnesses sign in your presence and in each other’s presence, under Iowa Code section 633.279. Pick adults who inherit nothing under the will; a disinterested witness keeps every gift you make safe from a later fight.

3. 3The affidavit

   Optional, and worth doing anyway: the self-proving affidavit, sworn by you and your witnesses before a notary in the exact form Iowa law sets out. Attach it, and an Iowa probate court can accept your will without ever tracking a witness down.

Handwritten and electronic wills

Iowa does not recognize a will that exists only in your own handwriting. Iowa Code section 633.279 requires every will to be signed and witnessed by two people watching each other sign, with no separate path for a page you wrote and signed alone. Iowa has also not authorized electronic wills, a document that lives only as a digital file with no paper original. Whichever way you start drafting, an Iowa will ends the same way: on paper, signed in front of two witnesses. That is exactly how Myend’s Last Will works here. You build the document online, then print and sign it with your witnesses, the form Iowa courts already know how to accept.

Property and your spouse

Iowa will not let a will fully cut out a spouse. Under Iowa Code section 633.238, a spouse who elects against your will does not receive one flat fraction of everything you own. Instead the law works pot by pot: about a third in value of the real estate you held at any point during the marriage, all the personal property that was exempt from your creditors because you were head of a family, and about a third of whatever other personal property is left once your debts are paid. See “What is different here” below for the full mechanics. In practice, this means knowing what you actually own, and how it is titled, matters as much as what your will says about it.

Your executor

Iowa calls the person who carries out your will the executor. Any competent adult can serve if they live in Iowa. Naming someone who lives out of state adds a real condition: under Iowa Code sections 633.63 and 633.64, the court ordinarily appoints a nonresident individual only to serve alongside an Iowa resident, not alone, unless the court finds good cause to waive that and let the nonresident serve by themselves. Many Iowans solve this by naming an Iowa resident as executor and an out-of-state family member as the backup. New to the role? Start with what an executor actually does.

If someone challenges the will

Iowa enforces no-contest clauses, the provisions that disinherit a beneficiary who challenges the will and loses. The Iowa Supreme Court set the modern standard in 2025, in In re Estate of Felten: a challenger avoids forfeiture only by showing both good faith and probable cause, meaning there was evidence that would lead a reasonable person to think the challenge had a real chance of succeeding. Iowa asks for both together, not either one alone, so a challenge brought honestly but without real evidence behind it still loses its inheritance under the clause.

If you do not make a will

Skip the will, and Iowa’s intestacy statute makes every decision for you, working through a preset order of blood relatives and a surviving spouse with no room for who you actually trusted or loved. It cannot leave anything to a friend, a partner you never married, or an organization that mattered to you, because the statute was not built to ask. A valid will is the only way to put your own answers in place of the state’s default order. See what happens if you die without a will.

What is different about Iowa

Iowa does not hand a surviving spouse one number. It hands them a claim on several separate piles of property, and the claim is assembled from the pieces.

Most fixed-share states settle the spousal elective share with a single calculation: total the net probate estate, take a third. Iowa Code section 633.238 does not work that way. It defines the elective share property class by property class: one third in value of any real estate the decedent held at any time during the marriage, not just at death, the entire block of personal property that was exempt from creditors because the decedent was head of a family, one third of whatever other personal property remains once debts and charges are paid, and in some cases one third of property the decedent kept in a revocable trust they controlled and could still change. Each category is measured on its own, then the spouse’s claim is built from the total.

The signing side reinforces the same instinct toward formality. Iowa recognizes neither a handwritten will nor an electronic one, so a witnessed paper signing is the only route into probate here. Put the two rules together and Iowa asks for more structure going in, on the day you sign, and gives a spouse a more particular, harder-to-estimate claim coming out, on the day you die. Both rules reward knowing exactly what you own and exactly how you signed for it.

Common questions

Sources and review