Letter of instruction: what to put in it (free template)

What a letter of instruction is

A letter of instruction is an informal, non-binding document that tells your family what to do and where everything is when you die: who to call, where the will and the accounts and the policies are, and what you wanted. It is also called a letter of last instruction. It sits beside your will, it never replaces it, and no state requires you to have one. Ohio State University Extension’s estate-planning series says it in one sentence: “There is no legal requirement for a letter of instruction, and it is not legally binding.”

That sounds like a weakness. It is the entire point. Because the letter has no legal force, it needs no lawyer, no witnesses, no notary, and no filing. You can write it tonight, on paper, in your own words, and change it whenever life changes. The will handles what must be enforceable. The letter handles everything a court will never care about but your family desperately will: which drawer, which advisor, which songs, which neighbor has the spare key.

One disambiguation before we start, because search engines blur it: this guide is about the estate document. A “shipper’s letter of instruction” is an unrelated export form, and the “letter of instruction” some employers use is a coaching memo. Different documents entirely.

Why it exists: the finding problem

Estates don’t only lose money to bad planning. They lose it to unfound paper.The numbers on this are not subtle. Since late 2016, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Life Insurance Policy Locator has matched beneficiaries with more than 611,000 lost policies and annuities worth $13.18 billion, money insurers owed to people who couldn’t find, or didn’t know about, the policy. State unclaimed-property programs returned $4.49 billion in fiscal 2024 alone, and the association behind them estimates roughly 1 in 7 Americans has property sitting in a state’s hands right now.

The planning statistics explain how it happens. Only 24% of American adults have a willat all, down from 33% in 2022. And in a 2026 survey of 5,000 adults commissioned by Trust & Will, 42% said they would not know what to do if a family member died today. The gap the letter fills is exactly that one: not “who inherits,” which the will answers, but “what do we do this week, and where is anything.”

We’ve measured a small corner of this ourselves. When we mapped the 105 document types a household accumulates, the set that matters in a death, the will, the policies, the deeds, the account statements, scattered across nearly every filing category there is. Nobody’s memory holds that map. The letter is where you write it down.

The timing problem with wills

The most common estate-planning mistake this letter fixes: putting funeral wishes in the will. A funeral happens within days. The will often surfaces later than that, and sometimes it legally can’t surface faster. If the will is in a safe deposit box, the box doesn’t simply open because you died. In New York, for example, SCPA §2003 creates two different routes: a court order can authorize a search for a will, burial-plot deed, or insurance policy; separately, a joint lessee or previously authorized deputy can inspect and copy papers about disposition of remains. If your family has neither fast access nor one of those eligible people, funeral wishes stored only in the box can still arrive too late.

So the practical rule is: wishes go in the letter, because the letter is what’s in the drawer. Your family reads it the same day. By the time the will is located, read, and eventually probated, the decisions it might have expressed opinions about have already been made.

There’s a third leg to this that almost nobody explains. The letter isn’t binding, and for most families that’s fine: people follow it because you wrote it. But if you need your wishes to be enforceable, say you expect disagreement about cremation, the answer still isn’t the will. Many states offer a separate statutory designation. In Texas, Health & Safety Code §711.002 puts the person named in a written instrument signed by the decedent first in line to control disposition of remains, ahead of even a surviving spouse, and recognizes directions given in a will, a prepaid funeral contract, or a signed and acknowledged written instrument. The triangle, then: the will is too slow, the letter is fast but not binding, and the statutory form is both, where your state offers one. Use the letter for the wishes and to say where the binding form is.

The two documents inside it

Every letter of instruction is really two documents stapled together, and they age at completely different speeds. The first is a letter in the true sense: who to call, what you want done, what you want said, where the letters to your children are. That part is stable. You might touch it every few years.

The second is an inventory: the accounts, the policies, the subscriptions, the location of every document that matters. That part starts going stale the day you print it. Banks merge, policies renew, accounts open and close. In the document data we published, about 1 in 7 household document types carries an expiration, and the account list in a letter rots faster than that. The classic failure mode of this whole genre is a beautifully written letter pointing at an inventory from four years ago.

Our templateseparates them on paper: Part A is the letter, Part B is the inventory, and Part B carries a “last reviewed” date on its face so anyone reading it knows how much to trust it. Write Part A once, carefully. Expect to redo Part B on a schedule.

What goes in it

University extension programs have published fill-in versions of this document for decades, and their section lists agree with each other almost completely. The University of Florida’s worksheet runs more than a dozen fill-in areas, from death notifications to taxes and trusts. Distilled, with the modern gaps filled:

• About the letter itself.Where the original lives, who has copies, where the will is, and who your executor is. Ohio State’s fact sheet is blunt about why this section exists: “If your loved ones do not know of the existence or the location of your letter of instruction, the letter is useless.”
• People to call first.Family, employer, attorney, accountant, financial advisor, insurance agent. Names and numbers, not “my lawyer.”
• Your wishes. Burial or cremation, service preferences, organ donation, the prepaid contract if one exists, obituary notes. Preferences here, binding forms elsewhere, as above.
• Personal messages. Or where the sealed ones are.
• Where the documents are. Estate documents, vital records, deeds and titles, tax returns, military discharge papers, the safe deposit box and its key. Locations, not contents.
• Accounts, insurance, debts. Institution, type, contact, last few digits. Life insurance deserves special care; a policy nobody knows about is how those NAIC billions happened.
• The household. Recurring bills, subscriptions, pets, the water shutoff, the alarm code holder. The things only you know, which is exactly what makes them dangerous to leave unwritten.
• Digital accounts. Done safely, which gets its own section below.
• The business, if you run one. A solo business stops the moment you do. Entity, formation documents, registered agent, and the one person who could keep it running for ninety days.

If you’re assembling this alongside the rest of the estate set, the estate planning documents checklist covers the binding documents this letter points at, and the what-to-do-when-someone-dies checklist is the same week seen from your family’s side. Reading it is the best test of your letter: every question it raises is a line your letter should answer.

What to leave out

The letter must never distribute property, and it must never contradict the will.Ohio State’s guidance: “It should never contradict the will, as the will takes precedence.” A letter that says the coin collection goes to your nephew when the will says otherwise doesn’t change anything legally, but it hands a grieving family a reason to fight, and a fight like that is exactly what probate disputes are made of. Fidelity’s estate-settlement guidance makes the same point: informal changes aren’t binding, but they can be used to dispute the documents that are.

Three rules cover it:

• No gifts.Who gets what is the will’s job. Some states honor a separate personal property memorandum for tangible items, but only when the will references it, and that is a document your attorney sets up, not this letter.
• No appointments.Executors, guardians, trustees, and beneficiaries are named in executed legal documents. A letter can’t change them, and attempting to just creates the appearance of a conflict.
• No secrets that need legal force. If a wish matters enough that someone might resist it, it belongs in a binding instrument. The letter is for everything nobody will litigate.

And one rule from the security side rather than the legal side: no passwords. That one deserves its own section.

Passwords and digital accounts

The most dangerous advice in the old letter-of-instruction worksheets is the password table. Several of the classic fill-in PDFs, including ones still ranking in search results, ask you to write your usernames, passwords, and PINs into an unencrypted document that will sit in a drawer for years. Don’t. It’s a security hole while you’re alive, it’s stale within months, and here is the part almost nobody says: a password list isn’t legal permission.Logging into a dead person’s account with a found password can violate the provider’s terms of service even when the person logging in is the executor.

The law that actually governs this is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, RUFADAA, adopted in nearly every state, more than 45 plus D.C. by most counts. It sets a three-step ladder for who can access your accounts after you die: first, whatever you set in the provider’s own online tool; second, what your estate documents say; third, the provider’s terms of service. Which means the highest-priority thing you can do takes minutes and requires no lawyer:

• Set the provider tools. Apple’s Legacy Contactlets someone you choose access your Apple account data after your death, with your access key and a death certificate. Google’s Inactive Account Managershares what you choose after your account goes quiet. These are RUFADAA’s first rung, and they override everything below them.
• Use a password manager’s emergency access. One credential vault, one designated person, and the letter only needs a single line: which manager, and who holds emergency access.
• Let the letter carry locations and authority, never credentials.Which email addresses exist, where money-holding accounts live, who has the authority. Note what these tools don’t cover, too: Apple’s Legacy Contact explicitly excludes Keychain passwords and purchased media, which is more proof that a stack of passwords was never the plan.

In the same Trust & Will survey, 48% said they had no instructions in place for their digital accounts at death. Two settings and one sentence in a letter put you in the other half.

The free template

Here is the whole document, ready to fill in. Print the blank worksheet, or download it as a PDF, free, no email, no account. It’s split into the two parts above, the guardrails are printed on the worksheet itself, and Part B has a review date on its face. Handwriting is fine; so is filling it in over a quiet weekend, one section a night.

Where to keep it

The letter’s only job is to be found, so store it for finding, not for safekeeping. The University of Florida’s guidance is the standard: “Keep the original and store in a safe place. Make several copies and give to your personal representative and attorney.” The original belongs with your estate documents at home, somewhere your family would look within a day. Specifically not: only in a safe deposit box, for the sealed-box reasons above, and not hidden so cleverly that it protects itself from your own family.

Copies create the second problem nobody warns you about: copy drift. The moment three paper copies exist, an update to one silently invalidates the other two, and the copy your executor holds is now the wrong one. Two habits prevent it. Date every version, on the letter itself. And when you revise, replace every copy the same week, which is much easier if you kept the list of who holds one.

This is also where we’ll say the honest thing about where a product like ours fits. Granite doesn’t write your letter and nothing in it is legal advice; the letter itself should live on paper, in the drawer, exactly as described. What Granite holds is everything the letter points to: drop in the policies, the deeds, the statements, and each one is read, filed, and findable with a question instead of a memory. Name one emergency contacton Granite Paid and the vault itself becomes reachable when you’re not, an opt-in inactivity heartbeat included. Part A stays yours and handwritten. Part B is the half a vault was built for.

When to update it

Annually, and at every trigger event.The annual pass is the floor; extension programs and every financial institution that writes about this document agree on it. But the calendar isn’t what stales a letter. Events are:

• Marriage, divorce, a birth, a death in the circle of people the letter names
• A move, a new safe deposit box, a new hiding place for anything the letter locates
• Opening or closing any account or policy in Part B
• A new executor, attorney, advisor, or emergency contact
• Changing password managers or the person holding emergency access
• Starting, selling, or winding down a business

The rhythm that works: put a recurring date on the calendar, reread Part A (usually fine), redo Part B (usually not), update the date on its face, and swap every copy. Twenty minutes a year, most years.

Letter of intent, ethical will, and other cousins

Three documents get mixed up with this one, and one of them gets mixed up in the other direction:

• Letter of intent.Often used as a loose synonym, but in special-needs planning it’s a distinct, detailed document: the day-to-day care guide for a dependent with a disability, written for future caregivers and trustees. If that’s your situation, write both, and keep them separate.
• Ethical will. A legacy letter: values, stories, lessons, the things you want remembered rather than the things you want done. No logistics at all. Part A of a letter of instruction can gesture at this, but a real ethical will is its own project.
• Personal property memorandum. The binding-in-some-states list of who gets specific tangible items, valid only when your will references it. It looks like a letter of instruction and is legally nothing like one. If you want one, it goes through your attorney and your will.
• Advance directive and living will.Those govern medical decisions while you’re alive and belong in the binding-documents set, not in this letter. The letter can say where they are.

The letter of instruction is the index to all of them. Every other document in the estate set does one legal job; this is the one that tells a stunned family, on the worst week of their lives, which documents exist, where they are, and what you hoped they’d do. It costs an evening. Few documents you’ll ever write are worth more per hour.