When you die without a will in Pennsylvania, there are intestate laws that determine who will inherit your estate. The rules can be very complicated depending upon your family. For example, there are very specific rules about how much the surviving spouse will receive along with the surviving children, depending on whether they are the issue of both the deceased and the surviving spouse.
If there is no surviving spouse, the intestate rules provide that the estate shall pass as follows:
- Issue;
- Parents;
- Brothers, sisters or their issue;
- Grandparents; and
- Uncles, aunts and their children and grandchildren.
In the past, if a decedent did not have any surviving family members, the default beneficiary has been the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If this occurred, the estate of the decedent would pass to Pennsylvania and be spent as part of its annual budget.
Under new rules passed as part of Act 50 of 2025, the estate of a deceased individual will now pass to an “Endowed Community Fund” if there are no family members as listed above. An Endowed Community Fund is defined as “a fund held by a community foundation that provides grants and benefits to charitable causes and is intended to exist in perpetuity.”
The Community Foundation must be an organization that meets various criteria, including that it has been in existence for 10 years, supports a broad range of charitable activities and qualifies for Federal income tax exemption. The community foundation receiving the decedent’s estate would be the fund serving the region of the decedent’s residence. “Residence” is defined as the decedent’s municipality, followed by school district and then county. Most charitable foundations serve counties rather than specific municipalities or school districts. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is still the default if there is no community foundation covering the area where the decedent lived.
The residence will likely be determined by the death certificate of the deceased. Often, older adults relocate to reside with a child or at a nursing home far from the community where they spent most of their life. Unfortunately, in those instances, the residence listed on the death certificate will determine which community foundation will benefit from the estate. It will be interesting to see how this law is interpreted if the administrator of the estate asks that another foundation more closely associated with the decedent’s primary lifetime residence be entitled to the proceeds of the estate.