Dying Without a Will in Texas
Die without a will in Texas, and state law doesn't leave the question open — Texas Estates Code Chapter 201 supplies a complete, mandatory answer for who inherits everything you own, in a fixed order that has nothing to do with what you actually wanted. Lawyers call this dying "intestate." There's no hearing where a judge asks what you would have preferred, no room for a verbal promise you made to a sibling, and no exception for a stepchild you raised but never formally adopted. The statute runs the calculation, and it runs the same way for every Texan who dies without a valid will.
The most common assumption — "my spouse automatically gets everything" — is often right in Texas, but not always, and the exceptions catch people off guard. Chapter 201 doesn't apply one rule to everything you own; it runs two separate calculations depending on which of two categories a given asset falls into, and whether every one of your children is also your spouse's child changes the answer completely.
Community Property vs. Separate Property
Section 201.003 governs your community estate — broadly, what you and your spouse built together during the marriage. If you have no children, or every one of your surviving children and their descendants is also your spouse's, your spouse inherits the entire community estate outright. But if you have a child or descendant who is not also your spouse's child — most commonly, a child from a prior relationship — your undivided half of the community estate bypasses your spouse and passes directly to that child or descendant instead; your spouse keeps the half that was already theirs. Either way, the community estate passes charged with the community debts against it.
Section 201.002 governs your separate estate — property outside the community estate — and splits it differently again, and less generously to your spouse, whenever you have children. With one or more children or their descendants surviving, your spouse takes only one-third of your separate personal property outright, plus a life estate in one-third of your separate real property, while your children take the other two-thirds of the personal property and the remainder interest in the land — your spouse can use that land for life, but your children own it. If you have no children or descendants of a child, your spouse fares better: all of the separate personal property, plus half of the separate real property outright. The other half of the land follows the intestate line described below — unless you leave no surviving parent, sibling, or sibling's descendant, in which case your spouse takes the entire separate estate.
If You Have No Spouse, Texas Still Has a Plan
Section 201.001 supplies the order of inheritance for anyone who dies without a surviving spouse — and it runs a long way before it gives up. Your estate first passes to your children and their descendants. If none survive you, it goes to your parents, in equal shares. If only one parent survives, that parent either splits the estate evenly with your siblings and their descendants, or takes everything if you have no siblings. If neither parent survives you, everything passes to your siblings and their descendants. Only if none of those relatives exist does the estate split into a paternal half and a maternal half, each tracing up to your grandparents and then outward to their descendants — and if even that line runs out, the statute keeps going to the next-nearest ancestors on each side, "and so on without end."
Who Legally Counts as an Heir
Before any of the shares above get paid out, Texas law has to settle who actually qualifies as an heir. An adopted child inherits exactly as a biological child would, from and through the adoptive parents and their kindred, and the adoptive family inherits from the child the same way (Estates Code §201.054(a)). The birth parents and their relatives lose the right to inherit from the child once the adoption is final — but that cutoff runs only one direction: the adopted child keeps the right to inherit from their birth parents, subject to one narrow exception found elsewhere in the Family Code (§201.054(b)). For a biological child, legal parentage is established by the circumstances of birth, a court's paternity determination, a signed acknowledgment of paternity, or — for a child conceived through a gestational or surrogacy agreement — the agreement's intended parents (§§201.051–201.052). And a potential heir actually has to survive you: Section 201.056 requires the person to be born, or already conceived, before your death, and then survive at least 120 hours afterward.
Two more rules can change the math. If your estate passes to collateral relatives — siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins — and some share only one parent with you while others share both, Section 201.057 gives each half-blood relative half of what a full-blood relative of the same degree receives. And if one of your children doesn't survive you but left children of their own, Texas doesn't skip that share to the next generation of relatives — your grandchildren step into their parent's place and divide what their parent would have received, a method Section 201.101 calls "per capita with representation." Separately, a parent who abandoned or failed to support a child, or who was convicted of seriously harming that child, can be legally barred from inheriting from the child at all (§201.062).
What Intestacy Doesn't Do
None of this happens automatically the way a funded trust or a payable-on-death account does. Before anyone can sell or transfer property that passed through intestate succession, the heirs typically have to formally establish who they are first — Section 201.053 addresses this directly by letting a good-faith buyer rely on a recorded affidavit of heirship, which only exists because establishing heirship is itself a real, separate step your family has to take. Dying without a will doesn't make Texas probate free or optional either; the court process, and the costs that come with it, still apply — see our Revocable Living Trust vs. Will page for exactly what a Texas probate administration costs.
The Fix Is a Will, Not a Formula
A will replaces all of the above with your own decisions: who inherits, in what shares, and who's in charge of making it happen. It's also the only way to make sure a stepchild you never formally adopted, a close friend, or a charity gets anything at all — Chapter 201 has no category for any of them. Our How to Make a Will page walks through what a valid Texas will actually requires, and our Estate Planning Checklist page covers everything else worth having in place alongside it.