Estate Planning in Pennsylvania: A Complete Guide for Berks County Families

A Pennsylvania estate planning checklist has five core items: a will, a durable financial power of attorney, a health care power of attorney, a living will, and up-to-date beneficiary designations. Many families add a revocable living trust. Together these documents decide who inherits, who acts if you cannot, and how much Pennsylvania inheritance tax your heirs pay.

What belongs on a Pennsylvania estate planning checklist?

A Pennsylvania estate planning checklist covers two separate jobs: deciding who receives your property after you die, and naming someone to act for you while you are alive but unable to act for yourself. Most plans need several documents to do both jobs well.

The working list for a Berks County family usually looks like this:

• A will, which names beneficiaries, names an executor, and can create trusts for minor or vulnerable beneficiaries.
• A revocable living trust, where the goal is to keep specific assets out of probate or to manage property for someone over time.
• A durable financial power of attorney, naming an agent to handle money, property, and paperwork if you cannot.
• A health care power of attorney, naming a health care agent to make medical decisions for you.
• A living will, recording your own instructions about life-sustaining treatment.
• A review of beneficiary designations and how each account and deed is titled, because those controls often move more value than the will does.

Which of these you actually need depends on what you own, who depends on you, and what you want to happen. That is a judgment call a lawyer has to make with your facts in front of them, which is why the firm's estate planning and trust administration work starts with an inventory rather than a form.

The obstacle is rarely disagreement about whether a plan is a good idea. It is follow-through. In its 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study, published September 17, 2025 and conducted with YouGov among 2,500+ American adults, Caring.com reported that “only 24% of wills survey respondents said they have a will, 13% reported a living trust, and 4% said they had other estate planning documents” — down from 33% of respondents with a will in 2022.

Your will: what Pennsylvania law actually requires

Pennsylvania's formal requirements for a will are short. Under 20 Pa.C.S. § 2502, “Every will shall be in writing and shall be signed by the testator at the end thereof,” subject to a few exceptions.

Two of those exceptions matter in practice. If the testator signs by mark, the statute requires two witnesses who sign their names in the testator's presence. If someone else signs the testator's name at the testator's express direction, the testator must declare the instrument to be their will in the presence of two witnesses who also sign. The statute also provides that writing placed after the signature does not invalidate what precedes it.

Separately, 20 Pa.C.S. § 3132.1 allows an attested will to be made self-proved, by the testator's acknowledgment and the witnesses' affidavits taken before an officer authorized to administer oaths and evidenced by that officer's certificate under official seal. A self-proved will is generally accepted by the Register as proof of the facts stated, which can shorten the probate step.

None of this means a homemade will is a good idea. Meeting the minimum for validity and producing a document that distributes an estate the way a family expects are different problems, and the second one is where most disputes begin.

Trusts, probate, and when a living trust earns its keep

A revocable living trust is a separate legal arrangement that holds assets you transfer into it, and property titled in the trust generally passes under the trust's terms rather than through probate. The trust does not, by itself, remove Pennsylvania inheritance tax.

Two practical points tend to decide whether a trust is worth its cost. The first is funding: a trust document that is signed but never retitled with the assets does very little. The second is ongoing administration, because a trustee takes on real duties once the trust becomes irrevocable. Our post on trust administration duties and responsibilities walks through what that job involves, and the companion piece on the legal rights of trust beneficiaries covers the other side of the relationship.

Trusts are also used for reasons that have nothing to do with probate — providing for a beneficiary who should not receive a lump sum, protecting an inheritance for children from a prior marriage, or holding property for a beneficiary with a disability. Whether any of those apply to you is a question for counsel, not a checklist.

The durable financial power of attorney

A financial power of attorney lets an agent you name handle money and property for you. In Pennsylvania it is presumed durable: 20 Pa.C.S. § 5601.1 provides that “unless specifically provided otherwise in the power of attorney, all powers of attorney shall be durable,” meaning the agent's authority survives your later incapacity.

The execution rules in 20 Pa.C.S. § 5601(b) are strict, and they are where do-it-yourself documents fail. A power of attorney must be dated and signed by the principal. For a power of attorney executed on or after the effective date of that paragraph, the principal's signature must be acknowledged before a notary public or other individual authorized to take acknowledgments, and witnessed by two individuals who are each 18 or older. The notary may not be the agent named in the document, and neither witness may be the agent or the notary.

Section 5601(c) adds a notice requirement. Every power of attorney must include a statutory notice in capital letters at the beginning of the document, and that notice must be signed by the principal. The statute is explicit about the consequence: “In the absence of a signed notice, upon a challenge to the authority of an agent to exercise a power under the power of attorney, the agent shall have the burden of demonstrating that the exercise of this authority is proper.”

Health care directives: the living will and the health care power of attorney

Pennsylvania treats these as two different documents under two different statutes, and most complete plans include both. A living will records your own instructions about life-sustaining treatment. A health care power of attorney names a person to decide for you.

Execution is similar for each. Under the Living Will Act, 20 Pa.C.S. § 5442, a living will must be dated and signed by the principal and witnessed by two individuals who are each 18 or older. Under the Health Care Agents and Representatives Act, 20 Pa.C.S. § 5452, a health care power of attorney carries the same dating, signing, and two-witness requirements. In both statutes, a person who signed the document on the principal's behalf may not serve as a witness.

When each document takes effect differs, and the difference matters. Section 5443 provides that a living will becomes operative when a copy is provided to the attending physician and the principal is determined by that physician to be incompetent and to have an end-stage medical condition or to be permanently unconscious. Section 5454 sets a lower threshold for the health care power of attorney: unless the document says otherwise, it becomes operative when a copy is provided to the attending physician and the physician determines that the principal is incompetent.

In plain terms, the health care agent can generally step in during an incapacity that is serious but not terminal, while the living will is reserved for the narrower end-of-life circumstances the statute defines.

Beneficiary designations and how title controls the outcome

A will does not govern every asset you own. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, and pay-on-death or transfer-on-death accounts pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form, and jointly held property often passes by operation of law to the survivor.

This is the single most common failure point in an otherwise sound plan. An ex-spouse left on a 401(k) form, a deed held jointly with one adult child, or a bank account made payable on death to a single sibling can redirect a large share of an estate away from what the will says.

The tax consequences follow the title as well. The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue states that “property owned jointly between spouses is exempt from inheritance tax,” while the Berks County Register of Wills notes that “jointly-held assets with individual(s) other than a spouse are generally subject to tax.” Adding a child to a deed to “keep it simple” can create a taxable transfer and a title problem at the same time. For families where the beneficiary picture is genuinely complicated, our post on estate planning for blended families goes further into how those designations interact.

How does Pennsylvania inheritance tax affect your estate plan?

Pennsylvania taxes inheritances by the recipient's relationship to the person who died, not by the size of the estate alone. That single design choice drives a large share of Pennsylvania planning decisions.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, the rates are:

• 0 percent on transfers to a surviving spouse or to a parent from a child aged 21 or younger;
• 4.5 percent on transfers to direct descendants and lineal heirs;
• 12 percent on transfers to siblings; and
• 15 percent on transfers to other heirs, except charitable organizations, exempt institutions and government entities exempt from tax.

The practical effect is that leaving property to a niece, a stepchild who was never adopted, a long-term partner, or a friend is taxed at a materially higher rate than leaving it to a child. Whether that changes what you should do is a planning question, but it should at least be a conscious choice rather than a surprise.

Timing carries money too. The Department states that “inheritance tax payments are due upon the death of the decedent and become delinquent nine months after the individual's death,” and that “if inheritance tax is paid within three months of the decedent's death, a 5 percent discount is allowed.”

Two exemptions are worth flagging for Berks County families. Effective for estates of decedents dying after June 30, 2012, certain farm land and other agricultural property are exempt from Pennsylvania inheritance tax, provided the property is transferred to eligible recipients. And effective for estates of decedents dying on or after September 6, 2022, personal property transferred from the estate of a serving military member who died as a result of an injury or illness received while on active duty, in a reserve component, or in the National Guard is exempt. Both exemptions carry conditions, and whether a particular farm or estate qualifies is not something to assume.

If there is no will: Pennsylvania's intestate rules

Dying without a will does not mean the Commonwealth takes your property. It means a statute decides who inherits, and the statute's answer is often not the one families expect.

Under 20 Pa.C.S. § 2102, the surviving spouse's intestate share depends on who else survives. If there is no surviving issue or parent, the spouse takes the entire intestate estate. If there is no surviving issue but a parent or parents survive, the spouse takes the first $30,000 plus one-half of the balance. If all of the decedent's surviving issue are also the spouse's issue, the spouse again takes the first $30,000 plus one-half of the balance. And if one or more of the decedent's surviving issue are not the spouse's issue, the spouse takes one-half of the intestate estate with no $30,000 allowance.

That last line is the one that surprises second marriages. A surviving spouse in a blended family can receive substantially less than a surviving spouse in a first marriage, purely because of who the children are.

This part of the law also just changed. Act 50 of 2025 — the Act of November 24, 2025, P.L. 308, No. 50 — amended 20 Pa.C.S. § 2103. Section 3 of the Act sets the amendment of section 2103 to take effect in 60 days, and the Governor approved the Act on November 24, 2025, which puts the change in force on January 23, 2026. Before it, in the absence of any familial heirs, the Commonwealth was the first statutory intestate heir. Under the amended section, an estate with no familial heirs passes first to an endowed community fund located in the decedent's municipality; if none exists, to one located in the decedent's school district; and if neither exists, to one located in the decedent's county, with the Commonwealth taking only if no endowed community fund exists in the municipality, county, or school district.