The $55,000 Digital Assets Statistic Is Wrong. The Australian Number Is Worse

There is a number that gets quoted constantly in digital estate planning, and it is wrong. The claim is that the average person holds around $55,000 in digital assets. It comes from a McAfee consumer security survey published in 2011, a marketing exercise that asked people what they thought their photos, music files and personal documents were worth to them. It measured sentiment, in US dollars, fifteen years ago, and it had nothing to do with estate planning.

We are not going to build an argument on it, because the real Australian picture is more useful and considerably more uncomfortable.

Start with what is actually measurable

The most concrete number in Australian digital-asset succession does not come from a survey at all. It comes from the Australian Taxation Office. As at 30 June 2025, there was $18.9 billion in lost and unclaimed superannuation sitting across just under 7.3 million accounts. That is not a projection or a sentiment score. It is money that exists, belongs to identifiable Australians, and is not where its owner can see it.

Superannuation is the most institutionalised, most regulated, most compulsory financial asset in the country, with annual statements, a government agency actively trying to reunite people with it, and a search tool built into myGov. And $18.9 billion of it is still lost.

Now consider the assets with none of that infrastructure. No annual statement. No regulator running a reunification programme. No central register. Just a login, and whoever remembers it.

Where the value actually hides

Nobody sits down and calculates their digital net worth, which is exactly why it slips past. A realistic Australian inventory usually includes:

• Loyalty and rewards balances. Qantas and Velocity points, hotel status, supermarket rewards, all accruing redeemable value quietly for years.
• Crypto holdings, on exchanges, in self-custody wallets, or split across both.
• Payment platform balances. PayPal, buy-now-pay-later credits, app store and gift card balances sitting behind a login rather than on a bank statement.
• Domain names, a side-project domain can carry real resale value and lapses fast without renewal.
• Digital goods and in-platform assets, game inventories, purchased media libraries, in-app currency.
• Income-producing accounts, a monetised channel, a marketplace seller account, an ad or affiliate account still paying out.

None of these appear on a bank statement. None come up in the standard "check your super and life insurance" conversation. They accumulate silently, across dozens of platforms, until someone, usually a grieving family member, has to find all of it at once, with no map and no logins.

The Australian planning gap is real, even if the statistic isn't

What survey data we do have in Australia is about wills, not digital assets, and it is not encouraging. Finder's research has put the share of Australians without a will at roughly 60 per cent, around 12 million people. Willed's 2025 survey of Australians aged 18 to 65 found about 54 per cent had one. The numbers move depending on who is asking and of whom, but the shape is consistent: a large minority to an outright majority of working-age Australians have not done the basic version of this.

If most people have not completed the estate planning step that has existed for centuries, has a well-worn professional pathway and comes up at every mortgage and every new baby, the odds that they have separately documented their crypto keys, their domain renewals and their loyalty balances are not good.

And there is no Australian equivalent of the ATO's lost super register for any of it. If a digital asset goes unclaimed here, there is no agency holding it, no search tool, and in most cases no record that it existed at all.

Why "the executor will work it out" fails

Executors in Australia have real legal authority over estate property. What they do not have is a statutory right of access to digital accounts. The NSW Law Reform Commission recommended creating exactly that in its 2019 Report 147, and no Australian state or territory has legislated it as at August 2026. Executors are left with each platform's individual policy, most of which offer account closure rather than access, and several of which offer nothing at all without a court order.

Superannuation adds its own wrinkle, because super is generally not an estate asset. It is held on trust, and the trustee decides where it goes, unless there is a valid binding death benefit nomination directing them. Under the SIS Regulations, a binding nomination made with an APRA-regulated fund typically lapses after three years unless it is renewed or the fund's deed allows a non-lapsing nomination. A nomination signed in 2019 and never revisited may simply not bind anyone now, which hands the decision back to a trustee who has never met the family.

So the honest position for most Australian households is: a possibly out-of-date will, a possibly lapsed super nomination, and an entirely undocumented digital layer sitting on top of both.

What to do about it, in an afternoon

This does not require a lawyer to start. It requires a list.

1. Inventory the accounts that hold value. Financial, crypto, loyalty, domains, income-producing. Not passwords, just what exists and where. That single document is the difference between an executor searching and an executor administering.
2. Consolidate what is genuinely dormant. Use the ATO's lost super search through myGov. Close the accounts you have not touched in years. Every account you close is one your family will never have to find.
3. Check your binding death benefit nomination. Find out whether it is lapsing or non-lapsing, when it was signed, and whether the people named are still the people you would name. Three years passes quickly.
4. Turn on the platform tools that exist. Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact. They only work if configured in advance, and they are free.
5. Write down what should happen, not just what exists. Which accounts should be closed, which memorialised, which transferred, and to whom. Access without instructions just moves the decision onto someone who is grieving.
6. Put the list somewhere your executor can actually reach. A document nobody can find is functionally identical to no document.

The point of the exercise

Forget the $55,000. The number that matters is your number, and you almost certainly do not know it, because nobody does until they sit down and count.

The ATO figure is instructive precisely because super is the easy case. It is tracked, regulated, and actively reunified, and $18.9 billion of it is still adrift. Everything without that scaffolding is more exposed, not less. The only mechanism standing between your digital assets and that same fate is a record you write while you still can.