Living will requirements in Washington

Which document is this, really

What most states call a living will, Washington calls the Directive, a document created under the state’s Natural Death Act for writing down the treatment you do and do not want if you are ever unable to speak for yourself. The law does not lock you into the state’s printed wording either: a Directive only has to be “generally consistent” with the guidelines the statute prints. Naming someone to decide on your behalf is a different job, handled by a different document: the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care, created under the Uniform Power of Attorney Act, a separate chapter of Washington law entirely. The person you name there is your agent.

Nothing about filling out one document fills in the other. Your treatment wishes belong in the Directive; your choice of agent belongs in the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care. Read closely, the two chapters land on the same signing rule anyway: sign before two witnesses, or have a notary acknowledge your signature instead of using witnesses at all. What actually differs between them is whose signature counts as a valid witness, which the next section covers.

Myend’s Healthcare Directive prepares both documents for Washington, the Directive and the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care, each formatted to what the state expects. Most people looking for this kind of planning search for “living will”, even though that is not the word Washington’s own statute uses.

Who can make a Washington directive

The Directive’s rule is 18, and the chapter says so through its own definitions rather than by printing the number: RCW 70.122.030 lets “any adult person” execute a directive, and RCW 70.122.020 defines an adult person as someone who has reached the age of majority under RCW 26.28.010, which is eighteen, and who has the capacity to make health care decisions. The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care sits in a different chapter that sets no age of its own, so plan on signing that one as an adult too. Past that line, what the law is really asking is that you signed voluntarily and understood what the document does at the moment you signed it. That is a judgment your witnesses make in the room with you, not a diagnosis or a certificate you need to produce beforehand.

Signing it so it counts

Two documents, two separate signings, and Washington does not let either one borrow the other’s witness list. Keep that straight: someone qualified to witness your Directive is not automatically qualified to witness your Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care.

The Directive

1. 1You sign

   You date and sign the Directive yourself.

2. 2Two witnesses, or a notary

   Choose one of two routes: sign in front of two witnesses, or bypass witnesses altogether and have a notary public acknowledge your signature. Either route is enough on its own.

3. 3If you go the witness route

   None of your two witnesses can be related to you by blood or marriage, your attending physician, an employee of that physician or of the facility treating you, someone with a claim on your estate, or anyone entitled to a share of your estate, whether under a will or codicil you have now or by operation of law.

Pick the notary route instead, and the witness lines above simply do not apply; a notary’s acknowledgment stands in for both of them.

The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care

Naming your agent happens on its own paper, under its own signing rule, though the rule itself echoes the Directive’s: two witnesses, or a notary instead. Who can serve as a witness is where the two documents part ways. For this document, a witness cannot be your home care provider, cannot provide care at the adult family home or long-term care facility where you live, and cannot be related to you or to your agent by blood, marriage, or state registered domestic partnership.

Naming your agent

Your Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care names the agent who steps in to make health care decisions once the document takes effect. Washington’s eligibility rule is short: your own physicians cannot serve, nor can their employees, nor can the owners, administrators, or employees of whatever health care or long-term care facility you live in or are receiving care from. That bar drops away entirely if the person is your spouse, your state registered domestic partner, a parent, an adult child, or a sibling. Outside that narrow group, anyone you trust is eligible.

When it takes effect

Washington’s Directive turns on when you become what the statute calls a qualified patient, and there are two separate paths to that status. Either your attending physician personally examines you and puts a terminal-condition diagnosis in writing, or two physicians, the attending physician plus one more, each personally examine you and put a permanent-unconscious-condition diagnosis in writing.

The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care runs on a different rule. RCW 11.125.090 makes a power of attorney effective when you execute it, unless you write into the document that it starts at a later date or on some future event, so the default is immediate. If you do write it to start on your incapacity and you have not named someone to make that call, the document turns on when a physician or licensed psychologist who is unrelated to you or your agent by blood or marriage examines you personally and puts the finding in writing. It is worth reading your own document rather than assuming, because that one clause decides which of the two rules applies to you. Washington’s insistence on a written diagnosis for the Directive is deliberate: it gives everyone involved a clear, documented moment when the Directive starts to control your care, instead of leaving that judgment to an informal read of the room.

If you are pregnant

On this point Washington law is silent. A clause that used to set the Directive aside for the rest of a pregnancy was repealed by the legislature in 2025, effective July 27 of that year. Read the statute today, including the printed form it contains, and pregnancy is not mentioned once. Your Directive controls exactly as written, pregnant or not.

Changing or cancelling it

Revoking your Directive does not require a form, but RCW 70.122.040 is specific about the routes. You can destroy it, or have someone destroy it in your presence at your direction, which needs no notice to anyone. You can write a revocation, which has to be signed and dated by you and takes effect only once it reaches your attending physician. You can say out loud that you are revoking it, which also takes effect only on reaching your attending physician. And if your directive is filed in the state registry, the Department of Health offers an online route as well, though not using it does not invalidate a revocation you made another way. Your mental state does not matter to any of this.

The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care is a different document with a different rule, and one part of it catches people out. Signing a new health care power of attorney does not cancel the old one on its own: RCW 11.125.100 says a later power of attorney revokes an earlier one only if the later document says so. Say it in the new document, or revoke the old one separately. That section also ends your agent’s authority automatically when an action is filed to dissolve, annul or legally separate your marriage or state registered domestic partnership with them, unless your document provides otherwise.

Making sure it is found

Washington offers a place to file a copy of both documents. RCW 70.122.130 has the Department of Health run a statewide health care declarations registry, and it takes a directive, a durable power of attorney for health care and a mental health advance directive alike. The statute says plainly that failing to file does not affect the validity of your document, so treat the registry as a backstop rather than the plan. The plan that actually works is putting a signed copy directly into three sets of hands: your agent, your regular physician, and the hospital where you would most likely end up, with the original stored somewhere your family does not have to search for it.

Cross state lines and Washington still honors a directive signed elsewhere: RCW 70.122.030(3) says a directive executed in another political jurisdiction is valid to the extent Washington law and federal constitutional law permit. Either way, a directive sitting in a drawer that nobody knows to check works no better than never having signed one, so telling your agent exactly where it lives matters as much as signing it in the first place.

This is not a POLST

Washington’s own medical-orders program is generally known as POLST, Portable Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment, and it plays an entirely different role than your Directive. A POLST is written and signed together with a clinician, only after you are already living with a serious illness, and it turns into standing orders that travel with you from hospital to ambulance to home. A Directive works the opposite way in timing: you fill it out well in advance, before any of that is on the table. Myend’s Healthcare Directive covers the Directive and the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care, the two documents you can put in place yourself. A POLST is not one of them; it can only come out of a conversation with your own treating clinician.

What is different about Washington

Washington repealed its own pregnancy clause in 2025, and quietly became a state where a directive says nothing about pregnancy at all.

Two separate statutes govern two separate documents here, and Washington keeps them that way down to the witness lists: qualified for one does not mean qualified for the other. Both documents share an unusually generous signing rule, letting you trade two witnesses for a single notary visit on either one, but that generosity does not extend to letting one document stand in for the other.

The pregnancy story is the more unusual part. Washington’s Directive used to set itself aside during pregnancy, a rule plenty of other states still carry. The legislature struck it in 2025, and nothing in the statute or its printed form has replaced it. The section that spells out how a Directive gets signed has actually been revisited several times since it was first written: 1979, then 1992, then 2019, then the 2025 repeal. This is a law the legislature keeps coming back to, not one it wrote once and left alone.

Washington also keeps a registry for people who want to file a copy of their Directive, and its clinician-signed medical order program is generally known as POLST. Put together, none of it makes Washington a hard state to plan in. It is a state with two separate forms instead of one, and a pregnancy rule that changed recently enough that older guides to Washington’s law are simply out of date.

Common questions

Sources and review