Estate Planning Trends
Estate Planning Trends
Caring.com's 2024 Wills Survey found estate planning rates falling for the first time since 2020, with income, education, and generation all shaping who has a plan and who doesn't.
Estate planning is supposed to be getting easier and more common, not less. Yet Caring.com's 2024 Wills and Estate Planning Survey, conducted with YouGov among more than 2,400 U.S. adults, found the opposite: only 32% of Americans now have a will, a six-point decline from 2023 and the first drop since the survey began tracking a pandemic-era surge in 2020. The reasons are less about avoidance than economics — a growing share of people say they simply don't believe they own enough to justify one. For families trying to help an aging parent, or trying to get their own affairs in order, the findings reveal exactly which barriers are stalling people, which generations are bucking the trend, and what would finally push the undecided to act.
Only 32% of Americans have a will in 2024, down from 38% in 2023. Lower-income, less-educated, and older adults saw the steepest declines, while 18-34-year-olds are the only group whose estate planning has grown since 2020.
For the first time since Caring.com began tracking estate planning during the pandemic, the share of Americans with a will has gone down. Only 32% of adults report having a will in 2024, a 6% drop from 2023. That reverses four straight years in which estate planning rates had held steady or climbed.
The decline is striking because attitudes haven't shifted alongside behavior. Sixty-four percent of respondents still say having a will is very or somewhat important — almost identical to prior years. Patrick Hicks, General Counsel of the digital estate planning platform Trust & Will, told Caring.com that wills matter for everyone, not just the wealthy, since they also cover healthcare decisions and guardianship for minor children.
That disconnect between belief and action is the core finding of the survey: Americans aren't rejecting the idea of estate planning, they're stalling on the execution, often for reasons tied to money rather than motivation.
The most common barrier remains simple procrastination, cited by 43% of Americans without a will. But the fastest-growing reason is a belief that there isn't enough to leave behind: 40% of people without a will now give that answer, up from 33% in 2022, a 21% increase in just two years.
That reasoning skews heavily by income. Of the Americans who say they lack sufficient assets, 49% earn $40,000 or less annually, compared with just 25% earning $80,000 or more. Lower earners are also far more likely to say a will is simply too expensive to set up.
Higher earners have a different problem. They're more than twice as likely as lower-income respondents to cite plain procrastination as their main barrier — 56% versus 32% — suggesting affordability isn't the obstacle for that group so much as never getting around to it.
Young adults are the one group moving in the opposite direction. Since 2020, the share of 18-34-year-olds with a will has grown 50%, rising from 16% to 24% in 2024. Meanwhile, middle-aged adults saw a 7% decline and adults 55 and older saw a 10% decline over the same period.
Millennials who created wills in the past three years pointed to the pandemic, growing assets, and starting families as their reasons. One 33-year-old surveyed said having a child made the stakes of not planning feel too high to ignore.
The result is a narrowing age gap in estate planning behavior, even as older Americans remain more likely than young adults to have a will in absolute terms. If current trends hold, the traditional assumption that estate planning is mainly an older-adult concern may not hold much longer.
| Document | What It Covers | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Will | Who inherits assets and who cares for minor children | Only 32% of adults have one in 2024 |
| Power of attorney | Who can manage finances if you're incapacitated | Complements a will, doesn't replace it |
| Advance directive | Healthcare decisions if you can't communicate them | Cited by Trust & Will as a core estate-plan function |
| Beneficiary designations | Who receives specific accounts or policies directly | Often overlooked even by people with a will |
Estate planning rates have moved in sharply different directions across racial and ethnic groups since 2020. Estate planning among Black Americans is up 19% since 2020 and 8% since 2023 alone, a rare gain in a year when the overall national rate fell.
White Americans, by contrast, saw a 3% decline since 2020 and a steeper 12% decline since 2023, narrowing what had been a wide gap between the two groups. Hispanic Americans saw the largest drop of any group tracked, down 21% since 2020 and 3% since last year.
These diverging trajectories suggest that broad, one-size-fits-all messaging about estate planning may be landing unevenly. Understanding which barriers — cost, distrust of legal systems, lack of information — are driving declines in specific communities could help close these gaps going forward.
Education level is one of the strongest predictors of who has a will. More than half of Americans with a postgraduate degree have one, compared with just 23% of those with a high school education or less — and that gap has grown from 41 percentage points in 2021 to 81 points in 2024.
Nearly every education group increased or held steady on estate planning since 2021 — except the least-educated group, where rates fell 25% over the same period. Among people without a will, 43% of those with a high school education or less cite insufficient assets, compared with 24% of postgraduate degree holders.
Interestingly, cost concerns run the other way: postgraduate-educated respondents are more likely to say a will is too expensive to set up. Lower-income Americans overall saw the steepest income-based decline, down 16% since 2020, from 25% to 21% among those earning $40,000 or less.
Inflation has become an unexpected force in estate planning decisions. Forty-two percent of Americans say rising prices have changed how they think about wills, and young adults are 57% more likely than those 55 and older to say their views shifted.
The effect cuts both ways. Nearly one in five respondents said inflation increased their sense that estate planning matters, worried about how rising costs will affect their heirs. Another 12% said rising asset values, such as home equity, motivated them. But 9% said falling asset values made a will feel less necessary, and 8% said they'd had to sell off assets, reducing their perceived need.
Black Americans were the most likely racial group to say inflation shifted their views toward greater urgency, at 35%, compared with 30% of Hispanic respondents and 26% of white respondents — another sign that economic pressure is reshaping estate planning unevenly across communities.
When Americans without a will were asked what would finally get them to create one, 43% pointed to a health concern or medical diagnosis — by far the most common trigger. Buying a home and retiring followed as other common motivators.
A troubling 23% said nothing would motivate them to create an estate plan at all, underscoring how entrenched procrastination and misperceptions about who needs a will remain, even among people who agree in principle that having one matters.
Motivators also differ by demographic. Men are about 50% more likely than women to say media or online coverage prompted them to act, while women are more likely to be motivated by the death of a loved one. Young adults are far more responsive to media coverage than older adults — 34% versus just 3% for those 55 and older.
Only 32% of Americans have a will in 2024, down from 38% in 2023. The decline hit lower-income, less-educated, and older adults hardest, while adults 18-34 are the only group whose will-holding has risen since 2020 — proof that cost and complexity, not just age, drive the gap.
Caring.com's 2024 survey found that only 32% of Americans have a will, a six-point drop from 2023 and the first decline since 2020. The gap between believing a will matters (64% do) and actually having one has widened rather than closed. Younger adults are the one bright spot, with will-holding up 50% since 2020, while middle-aged and older adults, lower-income households, and less-educated Americans have all lost ground. For families supporting an aging parent or planning their own future, the data is a prompt, not a verdict: a will, a power of attorney, and a healthcare directive can be put in place in a single afternoon, regardless of how large or small an estate is.
If an aging parent has no will, no power of attorney, and no healthcare directive, don't wait for a diagnosis to force the issue — 43% of people say a health scare is what finally prompts action, but by then decision-making capacity may already be in question. Start the conversation while everyone can still participate fully.