Can You Put Digital Assets in Your Will? The Australian Answer, and What to Do Instead

It is one of the most-asked questions in digital estate planning, and it gets asked so often because the intuitive answer feels obviously true: of course you can put your accounts in your will, they are yours, aren't they?

Mostly, no. And the gap between what people assume and what actually happens is exactly where families end up locked out of the things that mattered.

The short answer

A will governs property you own. Most digital accounts, email, social media, streaming subscriptions, cloud storage, even a good deal of what sits on a crypto exchange, are governed by a terms-of-service agreement you clicked "accept" on, not by a title deed. In legal terms you are usually licensing access to a service, not owning an asset the way you own a house or a car. A will cannot transfer a licence that, by its own terms, ends when you do.

That distinction is not a grey area, and it is not new. A will covers property and legal ownership rights. Your digital life is a separate category, and it needs a separate plan.

Australia has no law that fixes this

The United States has the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. RUFADAA, which gives American executors at least a statutory foothold to request access to some digital accounts after death. Australia has nothing equivalent, at Commonwealth or state level.

This is not for want of anyone noticing. The NSW Law Reform Commission handed down Report 147, Access to digital records upon death or incapacity, in December 2019. It was tabled in the NSW Parliament on 5 March 2020. It ran to 17 recommendations, the first of which proposed a new standalone statutory scheme letting an authorised person, an executor, an administrator, an attorney, a guardian, apply for access to a deceased or incapacitated person's digital records, with consequential amendments to the Succession Act 2006, the Probate and Administration Act 1898, the Powers of Attorney Act 2003 and the Guardianship Act 1987.

None of it has been enacted. In November 2021 the Meeting of Attorneys-General put a nationally consistent access scheme on the agenda, with NSW leading. As of August 2026, no Australian state or territory has passed legislation on access to digital records after death.

So the practical position for an Australian executor in 2026 is the one that existed in 2019: whatever each platform's own policy says, and nothing more.

What the platforms actually do

Those policies vary more than most people expect, and the variation is the whole problem.

• Google offers Inactive Account Manager, which lets you nominate up to 10 trusted contacts and set a timeout of 3, 6, 12 or 18 months of inactivity before they are notified and, if you choose, given access to specific data.
• Apple offers Digital Legacy, where you nominate up to five Legacy Contacts who receive an access key. With that key and a death certificate they can request access to most iCloud data, but not purchased media, subscriptions or payment information.
• Facebook offers a legacy contact who can manage a memorialised profile. They cannot read private messages and they do not get login access.
• X has no succession or memorialisation path at all. Estate representatives with a death certificate can ask for the account to be deactivated. That is the entire offering.

Notice what every one of those has in common: the useful options only work if the account holder set them up while alive. None of them are triggered by a will. None of them read your will. None of them care what your will says.

What a will actually can do

A will still matters here, just not in the way people assume.

• It appoints an executor, the person legally responsible for administering your estate, including, in practice, dealing with whatever digital footprint you leave behind.
• It can direct genuinely owned digital property, such as a domain name portfolio or crypto held in a way that amounts to real property rather than a platform-licensed balance.
• It cannot compel a platform to hand over account access, content or credentials that its own terms say end at death.

That last point is the one that trips people up. You can write "I leave my email account to my daughter" into a will and it means precisely nothing to Google if Google's policy does not recognise the transfer.

There is a further trap worth naming. Handing your executor a list of passwords is not the workaround it appears to be. Logging into someone else's account, even with the best intentions and even as the appointed executor, is a use of credentials the platform's terms did not authorise. It puts a well-meaning family member on the wrong side of the platform's rules, and potentially on the wrong side of the Commonwealth Criminal Code provisions on unauthorised access to computer data. The workaround most people reach for is the one the law is least comfortable with.

So what actually protects your family?

Not a will clause. A separate, maintained digital estate plan, sometimes called a digital directive, that does three things a will structurally cannot.

1. It catalogues everything. Every account, subscription, wallet and cloud asset, not just the obvious ones. Most people badly underestimate the size of that list until someone else has to build it from scratch, under time pressure, while grieving.
2. It stays current. A plan written once and filed away is a snapshot of a life from whenever it was written, not the life being lived now. Accounts open, close and migrate constantly.
3. It attaches instructions to access. Not just what exists, but what should happen to each item, memorialised, closed, transferred, handed over, and to whom, with verification of who is asking and why.

That third point matters more than it sounds. Digital estate planning is not one undifferentiated pile of access. Plenty of people are entirely comfortable with family inheriting the photo library and entirely uncomfortable with family reading fifteen years of private messages. A blanket "give my executor all my passwords" approach cannot express that difference. A properly structured plan can, because it can specify selective, verified release rather than an all-or-nothing handover.

The one line to remember

Digital assets do not go in a will. They go in a plan built for them. The will still matters, it appoints your executor and directs genuinely owned property, but the accounts, the subscriptions, the wallets, the cloud storage and the fifteen logins nobody remembers exist need a living, verified record that a will was never designed to hold.

Australia's lawmakers have known this since at least 2019. Six years on, the fix is still a document sitting on a shelf. Until that changes, the only reliable protection your family has is the one you build yourself, in advance.