How Many Americans Have a Will? 24%? Or Perhaps 46%? The Gap Is 59 Million Adults
By Jayne Welch, Staff Content Attorney and Legal Editor, US Legal Forms · July 2026 snapshot
According to the US Legal Forms Estate Planning Gap Audit, a July 2026 review of every major national will-ownership tracker, the number of Americans with a Last Will and Testament spans between 24% to 46%.[1,2] Applied to the roughly 267 million American adults,[7] that 22-point disparity would include 59 million people, nearly the size of the entire 65-and-older population of the United States. This leads to the theory that Will-ownership statistically is a method artifact (with phone surveys running approx. 20 points above similar panels online). The barrier to Will-ownership seen in every statistic tracker is not the price of the document, it is the idea of getting around to doing it.
The numbers at a glance
Key findings
- Across the US Legal Forms July 2026 audit of four national trackers, U.S. will ownership spans 24% to 46%, a 22-point spread equal to roughly 59 million adults.[1,2,7]
- Gallup’s telephone survey found 46% of U.S. adults have a will (May 2021, n=1,016); Caring.com’s online panel found 24% (2025 wave, n=2,500+).[1,2]
- Caring.com’s own tracker fell from 33% in 2022 to 24% in 2025, including an 8-point drop in a single year between the 2024 and 2025 waves.[2,3]
- Trust & Will’s 2026 survey of 5,000 adults (vendor-reported) puts will ownership at 26%, down from 31% a year earlier, and finds 56% of U.S. adults hold no estate planning documents at all.[4]
- 43% of Americans without a will say they “just haven’t gotten around to it,” the most common barrier in Caring.com’s surveys; 40% believe they don’t have enough assets to need one.[2,3]
- Adults 18–34 are the only age group whose will-ownership rate rose after 2020: from 16% in 2020 to 24% in 2024, per Caring.com.[3]
- Will ownership tracks income: 61% of households earning $100,000+ have a will versus 30% of those under $40,000 (Gallup, 2021).[1]
- An attorney-drafted simple will costs a flat $300 to $1,000 or more, and the average attorney bills $391 an hour (MetLife’s October 2025 cost guide, citing Nolo and ALM survey data).[5]
- Online will services now range from free to about $200 (National Council on Aging, April 2026); in the US Legal Forms July 2026 cost basket, a full year of access to every state-specific estate form costs about 15 minutes of average attorney time.[6,8]
- 73% of Americans say estate planning is personally important (Trust & Will, 2026), yet no tracker finds even half of them holding a will. The know-do gap, not awareness, is the durable finding.[4]
The headline number is a method artifact: phones say 46%, online panels say 24–33%
Ask by telephone, and America looks half-prepared for their death. Gallup’s May 2021 telephone survey of 1,016 adults found that “slightly less than half of U.S. adults, 46%, have a will that describes how they would like their money and estate to be handled after their death.”[1] Gallup adds that results “have been similar in three other readings on this question since 1990,” ranging 44% to 51%. By phone, the will rate has been stable for three decades.
Ask an online panel, and America looks unprepared and getting worse. Caring.com’s survey (fielded with YouGov, 2,500+ adults) found 24% with a will in its 2025 wave.[2] Trust & Will’s 2026 report (5,000 adults, fielded January 28 to February 5, 2026) found 26%.[4] Caring.com’s 2024 wave found 32%.[3]
Every tracker reading: will ownership by survey and mode
| Tracker | Mode | Sample | Fielded | Adults with a will |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gallup [1] | Telephone | 1,016 | May 3–18, 2021 | 46% |
| Caring.com w/ YouGov [3] | Online panel | 2,481 | Dec 3–4, 2023 (2024 report) | 32% |
| Caring.com w/ YouGov [2] | Online panel | 2,500+ | 2025 report | 24% |
| Trust & Will* [4] | Online | 5,000 | Jan 28 – Feb 5, 2026 | 26% |
The pattern is consistent with a known survey effect: phone respondents skew older and more established, and live interviews invite social-desirability answers (“of course I have a will”). Online panels skew younger and answer anonymously. Neither is “the truth.”
Takeaway: any article quoting one will-ownership number without naming the survey mode is quoting noise.
The 22-point disagreement is 59 million adults, nearly the entire U.S. 65+ population
The U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 estimates put the under-18 population at 73.1 million, which the Bureau says is 21.5% of the total population.[7] That implies roughly 340 million residents and about 267 million adults (US Legal Forms computation, July 2026, from Census Vintage 2024 figures).
Run the survey range across that base and the disagreement becomes physical:
- At Gallup’s 46%, about 144 million adults have no will.
- At Caring.com’s 24%, about 203 million adults have no will.
- The gap between those two honest, defensible statements is 58.7 million adults. For scale, the Census counts the entire 65-and-older population at 61.2 million.[7]
In the US Legal Forms July 2026 recompute, the measurement disagreement alone is the size of a generation.
Takeaway: cite the range, 24–46%, or cite nothing.
The trackers don’t even agree with themselves
Two internal contradictions matter more than the headline spread.
Caring.com vs. Caring.com. The same tracker, same methodology partner, reports 33% (2022), 32% (2024, which it describes as “a 6% decline from 2023”), then 24% (2025).[2,3] An 8-point single-year fall is a 25% relative collapse in will ownership in twelve months. Nothing in American life changed that fast in 2024. Panel composition, question wording, or weighting almost certainly did. Trust & Will’s series dropped 5 points (31% to 26%) over the same period,[4] which corroborates the direction but not the magnitude.
Gallup vs. Trust & Will. A separate Gallup reading in 2020 found approximately 45% of Americans have living wills.[1] Trust & Will’s 2026 survey says 56% of U.S. adults have no estate planning documents whatsoever,[4] a category that includes living wills, medical POAs, and HIPAA authorizations. Both cannot be right. Either nearly half the country quietly shredded its living wills, or the two instruments measure different populations with different questions. (They do: phone vs. online, “living will” as a named prompt vs. a document checklist.)
Takeaway: treat every estate planning statistic as a property of its questionnaire, not of the population.
The stat graveyard: “55%,” “60%,” and “70% die without a will”
Three numbers circulate endlessly in this niche. None survives an audit.
- “55% of American adults do not have a will.” Traceable to mid-2010s listicles (a law-firm statistics page published in February 2015 carries it with a now-dead “(source)” link[9]) and still posted verbatim by law firms as of June 2026. No reachable primary. Zombie.
- “70% of Americans die without a will.” Appears on estate-attorney marketing pages as “as many as 70 percent,”[10] never with a named study. No reachable primary. Zombie.
- “60% of Americans lack a will or estate plan.” This one has a real source: AARP’s 2017-era headline citing Caring.com’s survey of that year.[11] It is not fake, just fossilized. The tracker it cites now reports 24%. Retired.
There is even drift in the cost numbers. MetLife’s October 2025 guide states “the average cost of creating a will using an online estate planning service is $160,” citing the National Council on Aging’s 2024 guide.[5] NCOA’s current guide (updated April 2026) no longer contains that figure; it now describes services “ranging from free (for very basic documents) to around $200.”[6] The $160 average died in an update, and the insurer citing it hasn’t noticed yet.
Takeaway: in estate planning, even the fact-checks need fact-checking, which is why every figure on this page carries its source and date in the sentence.
The barrier isn’t the price of the document. It’s the getting around to it.
If cost were the wall, the cheapest documents in history (free, per NCOA[6]) would have moved the needle. The trackers say otherwise:
- 43% of respondents without a will told Caring.com they “just haven’t gotten around to it,” the most common barrier in both the 2024 and 2025 waves.[2,3]
- 40% who don’t have a will say “it’s because they don’t have enough assets to leave anyone” (Caring.com, 2024).[3] That is a belief about eligibility, not a price complaint, and it is wrong as a matter of law: state intestacy statutes decide who gets a car, a bank account, or custody preferences when there is no will, regardless of how small the estate is.
- 73% of Americans tell Trust & Will (2026) that estate planning is personally important.[4] Awareness is not the constraint.
One AI-era footnote from the same vendor survey: 30% of Americans now say they trust AI advice more than a human attorney for estate planning (up from 20% in 2025), yet only 5% would use AI without attorney review.[4]
Takeaway: the market’s problem is procrastination and a false “not for people like me” belief, not document prices.
The only cohort getting better: adults under 35
Every age group’s will-ownership declined after 2020 except one. Caring.com’s 2024 wave found that “the number of young adults aged 18-34 with a will has increased by 50%, going from 16% in 2020 to 24% in 2024,” making them “the only age group that has not seen a decline in estate planning rates since 2020.”[3]
Age still dominates the cross-section (Gallup, 2021, by telephone):[1]
| Age group | Will ownership (Gallup telephone, 2021) |
|---|---|
| 65+ | 76% |
| 50–64 | 53% |
| 30–49 | 36% |
| 18–29 | 20% |
A pandemic-era mortality reminder, cheap online tools, and digital-native comfort with DIY documents are the standard explanations for the youth uptick; the surveys record the change, not its cause.
Takeaway: the growth segment in estate planning is the one that was never going to book a $391-an-hour appointment.
What a will actually costs in 2026: $0 to $1,000+, and the “average” is drifting
The US Legal Forms July 2026 cost basket, built from published national anchors and our own catalog at uslegalforms.com:
| Route | Document(s) | Published cost |
|---|---|---|
| Attorney, flat fee | Simple will | $300 – $1,000+ (MetLife/Nolo, Oct 2025) [5] |
| Attorney, flat fee | Durable power of attorney | “a few hundred dollars” (MetLife/Nolo) [5] |
| Attorney, flat fee | Living will | ~$100 (MetLife/Nolo) [5] |
| Attorney, flat fee | Living trust | $1,200 – $1,500 (MetLife/Nolo) [5] |
| Attorney, hourly | Any | $391/hour average (ALM survey via MetLife) [5] |
| Online services | Will | Free – ~$200 (NCOA, Apr 2026) [6] |
| US Legal Forms (uslegalforms.com) | State-specific Life Documents package: will + POA + living will/health care directive + guardianship forms | Basic $8/month, Premium $15/month (billed annually), July 2026 pricing [8] |
Taking the published ranges at face value, the attorney route to the same three-document core (will, POA, living will) runs roughly $600 to $1,600.[5] A full year of US Legal Forms Basic costs $96,[8] which at the $391 average hourly rate is about 15 minutes of attorney time (US Legal Forms computation, July 2026). Gallup’s income gradient (61% will ownership at $100k+ household income vs. 30% under $40k[1]) shows who the attorney pricing model serves and who it leaves out.
| Household income | Will ownership (Gallup telephone, 2021) |
|---|---|
| $100,000+ | 61% |
| $40,000–$99,999 | 49% |
| Under $40,000 | 30% |
Where this doesn’t hold: the DIY math applies to simple estates. Blended families, business ownership, contested inheritances, special-needs beneficiaries, and tax-planning trusts genuinely need a lawyer, and for those estates the attorney fee is cheap insurance, not a markup. For the drafting mechanics, see our step-by-step guide to writing a Last Will and Testament and the breakdown of will types.
Disclosure: US Legal Forms sells the subscription in this table. The third-party anchors (MetLife, Nolo, NCOA, ALM) are cited precisely so you can check the comparison without taking our word for it.
How to cite this page
Cite as: US Legal Forms, “The US Legal Forms Estate Planning Gap Audit,” blog.uslegalforms.com/personal/estate-planning-statistics/ (July 2026 snapshot).
The computed figures on this page (the 24–46% audited range, the 59-million-adult disagreement, the 144–203 million no-will range, and the cost basket) are released under CC BY 4.0: reuse them freely, including commercially, with attribution to US Legal Forms.
Journalists and researchers can download the full audit table as CSV.
Methodology
The US Legal Forms Estate Planning Gap Audit aggregates every national will-ownership tracker with a reachable primary source: Gallup (telephone, 2021), Caring.com/YouGov (online, 2022–2025 waves), and Trust & Will (online, 2026, labeled vendor-reported). Cost anchors come from MetLife’s October 2025 cost guide (which sources Nolo and the ALM/National Law Journal attorney-rate survey) and the National Council on Aging’s April 2026 guide. Population denominators are U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2024 estimates. Each figure was re-verified against its primary source on July 24, 2026; statistics whose primaries were unreachable or undated were either excluded or explicitly debunked in the stat graveyard section. Computed layers (population recomputes, the cost basket, the audit range) are by US Legal Forms; the arithmetic is shown in the text. This page is refreshed annually or when a tracker publishes a new wave; figures are from the July 2026 snapshot.
Sources
- Gallup, “How Many Americans Have a Will?” (2021): news.gallup.com/poll/351500/how-many-americans-have-will.aspx
- Caring.com, “2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study” (2025): caring.com/caregivers/estate-planning/wills-survey/
- Caring.com, “2024 Wills and Estate Planning Study” (2024): caring.com/caregivers/estate-planning/wills-survey/2024-survey/
- Trust & Will, “2026 Estate Planning Report” (April 7, 2026), via PRNewswire: prnewswire.com/…-302735330.html
- MetLife, “How much does it cost to make a will?” (October 27, 2025): metlife.com/stories/legal/how-much-does-a-will-cost
- National Council on Aging, “How to Make a Will Without a Lawyer” (updated April 27, 2026): ncoa.org/article/how-to-make-a-will-without-a-lawyer/
- U.S. Census Bureau, “Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States and Nearly Half of U.S. Counties,” Vintage 2024 Population Estimates (June 26, 2025): census.gov/newsroom/…/older-adults-outnumber-children.html
- US Legal Forms, “Plans and Pricing” (retrieved July 24, 2026): uslegalforms.com/pricing
- LifeGen Law Group, “Estate Planning Statistics” (February 24, 2015) — earliest reachable carrier of the “55%” claim, cited here as a debunk exhibit: lifegenlawgroup.com/estate-planning-statistics
- Mulvena & Winston, “One Scary Statistic You Can Easily Avoid” — carrier of the “70%” claim, cited as a debunk exhibit: mulvenawinston.com/one-scary-statistic-you-can-easily-avoid
- AARP, “Survey: 60% of Americans Lack Will or Estate Planning” (2017 era, citing Caring.com’s 2017 wave), cited as a retired-stat exhibit: aarp.org/money/retirement/half-of-adults-do-not-have-wills
FAQ
What percentage of Americans have a will in 2026?
Between 24% and 46%, depending on the survey: Gallup’s telephone poll found 46% (2021), while online panels report 24% (Caring.com, 2025) and 26% (Trust & Will, 2026). The honest answer is the range; phone surveys consistently run higher than online panels on this question.
How much does it cost to make a will in 2026?
Online services run from free to about $200 per the National Council on Aging’s April 2026 guide. An attorney-drafted simple will costs a flat $300 to $1,000 or more per MetLife’s 2025 cost guide. Form subscriptions such as US Legal Forms cover state-specific will packages from $8 a month.
How much does an estate planning attorney cost?
The average attorney rate is $391 an hour per the ALM/National Law Journal survey cited by MetLife (2025). Flat-fee packages run about $300–$1,000 for a simple will and $1,200–$1,500 for a living trust, per Nolo’s figures in the same guide.
How much does a power of attorney cost?
A few hundred dollars as an attorney flat fee, per MetLife’s 2025 guide. State-specific POA forms are also included in bundled estate packages: US Legal Forms’ Life Documents package pairs the POA with a will and living will under one subscription.
Why don’t most Americans have a will?
Procrastination, not price: 43% of people without a will told Caring.com they just haven’t gotten around to it, and another 40% believe they don’t own enough assets to need one. That second belief is mistaken; state intestacy law distributes even small estates, and it does so without consulting your wishes.
Written by Jayne Welch, Staff Content Attorney and Legal Editor at US Legal Forms. Every figure on this page was compiled and re-verified against its primary source on July 24, 2026; the computed layers and their arithmetic are shown in the text.
