Will requirements in Maine

Who can make a will in Maine

Maine’s rule for who can make a will is short: you need to be at least 18, or a legally emancipated minor if you are younger, and you need to be of sound mind when you sign (18-C M.R.S. § 2-501). Sound mind is not a medical bar. It means you can say, in your own words, roughly what you own, who your family is, and what your will does with it.

Signing your will in Maine

1. 1You sign

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

2. 2Two witnesses sign

   Two witnesses, each of whom watches you sign or watches you acknowledge the signature or the will, sign it themselves within a reasonable time afterward (18-C M.R.S. § 2-502). A notary does not stand in for either witness. Maine has no provision letting one replace the other.

3. 3The affidavit

   Optional, but worth doing: the self-proved will affidavit. You and your witnesses swear to a separate acknowledgment before a notary or another officer authorized to take oaths, attached to the will (18-C M.R.S. § 2-503), and the Probate Court can then accept the will without calling either witness back.

Handwritten and electronic wills

Maine recognizes a holographic will: one that skips the witnessed ceremony entirely, as long as your signature and the material portions of the document, the parts that actually say who gets what, are in your own handwriting (18-C M.R.S. § 2-502(2)). It is a real, usable option, not a technicality nobody reaches for, though a document nobody else has read still carries more risk of an ambiguous line or a forgotten asset. Maine has not authorized an electronic will. The statute that sets out how a will is executed only describes paper, either witnessed or handwritten. 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 Maine: the elective share

Maine is a common-law property state, so nothing you and your spouse earn during the marriage becomes jointly owned by default the way it would in a community-property state. Instead, Maine protects a surviving spouse through the elective share: the right to claim a portion of the estate no matter what the will says.

The mechanism is not one flat percentage. Maine first sets aside a marital property portion of the augmented estate, a calculated slice meant to stand in for what a community-property state would already treat as jointly owned. A schedule tied to how long you were married then decides how much of that narrower slice the surviving spouse can claim, running from 3 percent for a marriage under a year to a full 100 percent once the marriage reaches fifteen years (18-C M.R.S. §§ 2-202(1), 2-203(2)). Run the two steps together and the spouse’s guaranteed floor moves from roughly 1.5 percent of the augmented estate in the earliest years up to a ceiling of 50 percent at fifteen years. You can always leave your spouse more than the elective share provides. A will alone cannot leave them less.

Your executor

Maine calls the person who carries out your will the executor. The job is mostly logistics: filing the will with the Probate Court, taking inventory of what you owned, paying what the estate owes, and distributing what is left the way your will directs. Choose someone organized enough to keep track of deadlines and willing to take on a role that is more paperwork than drama, and name a backup in case your first choice cannot serve when the time comes. New to the role? Start with what an executor actually does.

If someone challenges the will

Maine allows a no-contest clause: a provision that disinherits a beneficiary who challenges the will and loses. But the clause has a real limit. It is unenforceable against anyone who had probable cause to bring the challenge in the first place (18-C M.R.S. § 2-516). A beneficiary with a genuine, reasonable basis, a forged signature, undue influence, a testator who was not of sound mind, can raise it without automatically forfeiting their gift. What the clause discourages is the challenge with no real basis behind it at all.

If you do not make a will

Die without a will in Maine and the state’s intestacy statute decides who inherits, filed and administered through the Probate Court in whichever of Maine’s sixteen counties you lived in, each presided over by its own separately elected Judge of Probate (4 M.R.S. § 301). That process does not ask what you would have wanted. It works from a fixed list of relatives, and it has no entry for an unmarried partner, a stepchild you never formally adopted, a friend who was family in every way but paperwork, or a favorite charity. A will is how you replace that list with your own instructions. See what happens if you die without a will for how that default order works.

What is different about Maine

Maine’s spousal elective share is not a straight percentage of your estate. It is a percentage of a percentage, built to work the way a community-property state would, without ever becoming one.

Start with the plain fact: Maine accepts a will written and signed entirely in your own hand, no witnesses required for that version, one of roughly half the states that still allow it. That alone would make Maine unremarkable among its neighbors. What sets the state apart is what happened to the rest of its will law in 2019.

That year, Maine’s legislature retired the older Title 18-A and replaced it with Title 18-C, adopting the modern revision of the Uniform Probate Code’s elective-share article (18-C M.R.S. § 8-301 fixes the effective date). The older approach, still running in many states, applies a single sliding percentage straight against the whole augmented estate: a small share in an early marriage, climbing toward half after enough years. Maine’s 2019 version works in two steps instead of one. It first carves out a marital property portion of the augmented estate, a calculated slice meant to stand in for what a community-property state would already call jointly owned, and only then applies the marriage-length schedule, running from 3 percent to a full 100 percent, against that narrower slice rather than the whole estate (18-C M.R.S. §§ 2-202(1), 2-203(2)). The two-step math lands in the same ceiling other sliding-share states use, half the augmented estate after fifteen years, but it gets there by asking what belongs to the marriage first and what belongs to the individual second, the same question a community-property state asks, answered here with a formula instead of a title on a deed.

Put the two facts together and Maine reads like a state caught between two legal traditions: forgiving about how you write the will, precise about what a long marriage is owed once you have one.

Common questions

Sources and review