Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025: What It Changed

A short statute that passed with little public attention has changed something that estate practitioners in England and Wales had argued about for years: whether a digital asset can be owned at all. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 runs to one operative sentence. Its practical effect on a will, a probate application or a disputed wallet is still being worked out, and understanding what it does not say matters as much as what it does.

Conclusion: property status is settled, access is not

The Act answers a question about ownership and leaves untouched the question families actually face, which is access. A crypto-token held in self-custody is now clearly capable of being property of the estate, but the estate still cannot use it without the seed phrase. An email account is not helped by the Act at all, because access to it is governed by the service contract and by the prohibition on unauthorised access to communications. Property status without an access route converts a legal argument into a practical loss.

What the Act actually says

Section 1 provides that a thing, including a thing that is digital or electronic in nature, is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither a thing in possession nor a thing in action. That is the whole substantive content. It was passed to implement the Law Commission recommendation that legislation confirm a third category, removing the argument that a digital asset must be forced into one of the two traditional categories before any right can attach to it.

Three things it deliberately does not do

• It defines no assets — Crypto-tokens, NFTs, in-game items, domain names, carbon credits and email accounts are all left to the courts. The Law Commission criteria, applied judicially, require data in electronic form, existence independent of persons and of the legal system, and rivalrousness, meaning one person use excludes another
• It creates no access right — Property rights and access rights are different things. Section 1 says nothing about service providers, terms of service or data protection, and a token being property does not oblige a platform to hand over an account
• It does not extend to Scotland — The Act extends to England and Wales and Northern Ireland only. Scots property law is separate, and the question of whether crypto-assets are property there is being addressed by a different reform process

What changes in practice for a will or probate

For drafting, the change is small but real. A will that leaves a specific digital asset to a named person no longer rests on an argument about whether the asset can be owned. For probate, personal representatives have a clearer basis to collect and protect digital assets as part of the estate, which is the duty that already applies to everything else. For insolvency and creditor claims, the position is stronger still, because proprietary claims over tokens no longer depend on the property question. The wider legal map is covered in digital inheritance law by country.

What does not change is that the will must not contain the credentials. A will becomes a public document once probate is granted and can be inspected by anyone with an interest, so a seed phrase written into it is disclosed, not protected. The document should name the asset class, identify roughly where it is held and name the person responsible; the seed phrase belongs somewhere else entirely, as set out in digital will vs letter of instructions.

The access problem the Act leaves standing

UK law is unusually explicit here: accessing another person online account without authority can be an offence under computer misuse legislation, even for an executor acting in good faith. Title to the deceased assets vests in personal representatives through the will or a grant of representation, but authority to log in usually has to come from the service provider. Apple, Google and Meta have all built digital legacy tools in response to this gap, but each requires the account holder to have acted before death. A will cannot switch those tools on afterwards. The limits of what they release are covered in what a legacy contact cannot access.

A practical sequence for UK estates

• Step 1: separate property from access in your own mind — List assets the estate owns and, separately, accounts the estate can reach. Most families discover the second list is far shorter than the first, and that gap is the real planning target
• Step 2: use platform legacy tools while you can — Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Digital Legacy and Meta legacy contacts are the only mechanisms that reliably open an account after death. They override the will under the platform terms in practice, because they are the only path the provider recognises
• Step 3: keep a seed phrase record outside the will — Sealed with a solicitor, split with a co-signer, or held in a vault with a designated recipient. Any of these beats a line in a document that becomes public. See crypto wallet inheritance
• Step 4: tell the executor the plan exists — Not the credentials, just the location and the trigger. An executor who does not know a record exists will apply for probate and never look for it
• Step 5: review after any significant change — New wallet, new platform, change of executor or a move across the border into Scotland. Each of these resets part of the analysis

Where this leaves the wider reform

The Act was deliberately minimal because the Law Commission judged the common law flexible enough to absorb digital assets if the statutory barrier were removed. That means the substantive rules will come from litigation, slowly and expensively, case by case. It also means the position on access to content, as opposed to ownership of an asset, remains governed by contract and data protection, where the UK has no equivalent of the deceased person provisions some EU states have adopted. TimeWill holds the inventory, the location of the credentials and the instructions encrypted, and releases them to a named contact through heartbeat check-in, which is the practical layer the statute does not provide.

Disclaimer

This article is general information, not legal advice. The Act is new and its boundaries are still being developed by the courts, and probate practice differs across England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Confirm the current position with a solicitor qualified in the relevant jurisdiction before relying on anything described here.