Most people spend an afternoon getting a will drafted and signed, then never think about the document again. That’s fair enough. The hard part felt like the decisions, not the filing. But in South Africa, where that piece of paper physically sits matters nearly as much as what’s written on it.
Fees and bank services change. Everything here is correct as at August 2026. Check current requirements with the Master of the High Court or your attorney before acting on any of it.
The original is the only version that counts
When someone dies, whoever holds the will has to hand the original to the Master of the High Court. Section 8(1) of the Administration of Estates Act 66 of 1965 places that duty on any person who has the document in their possession, as soon as they learn of the death. The estate itself has to be reported to the Master within 14 days.
A photocopy or a scan won’t do the job on its own. The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 excludes wills from the documents it recognises in electronic form. Signed paper is still the requirement, however dated that feels.
If nobody can find it, the law may assume you destroyed it
This is the part that catches families off guard. If a will was last known to be in the testator’s own possession and can’t be traced after death, our courts apply a rebuttable presumption that the testator destroyed it on purpose, meaning to revoke it.
Rebutting that presumption takes a High Court application supported by affidavits. It’s slow and it costs money, at a point when the family already has enough to deal with.
There’s a useful nuance here. The presumption doesn’t arise where the will was in somebody else’s keeping, such as the attorney who drafted it. Professional safe custody removes that particular risk entirely.
The home safe
A good fireproof safe is a reasonable option, and fire is rarely what actually goes wrong. The more common failure is a safe nobody else can open, in a house where nobody knew the will was in there to begin with.
If you keep it at home, do two things. Tell at least two people it exists and where it lives, and make sure at least one of them can physically get into the safe without you.
The bank safe deposit box
Two problems here, and the first is access. Safe custody terms generally release the contents to the account holder, or after death to someone formally entitled to act for the estate, which means the appointed executor. Standard Bank’s published safe custody terms give a sense of how these arrangements are usually written. If that’s how your bank’s terms read, and the will needed to appoint the executor is sitting inside the box, your family has a circular problem on their hands. Read the terms before you rely on it.
The second problem is that the big banks have been leaving this business. FNB stopped accepting new safe custody applications in 2017, Nedbank began phasing out its boxes in 2019, and Absa closed its safe custody service on 30 September 2024. Private vault operators have picked up some of the slack.
Your attorney’s strongroom
Usually free, usually the simplest answer, and it sidesteps the revocation presumption because a third party is holding the document.
The risk is drift. Firms close and merge, and practitioners retire. If your will has been with the same firm for fifteen years, confirm it’s still there under the same name, and make sure your family knows which firm to phone.
The bank or trust company that drafts it for free
Several institutions will draft and store a will at no charge, on the understanding that they’re nominated as executor. That’s a legitimate arrangement, but it’s worth knowing what it costs later.
Executor’s remuneration is capped by Regulation 8 of the regulations to the Administration of Estates Act: 3.5% of the gross value of estate assets, plus 6% on income collected after death, with a minimum of R350. VAT is added where the executor is a registered vendor, which professional executors typically are. On a R4 million estate, the capital fee alone works out to R140,000.
That figure is a maximum, not a fixed price, and it can be negotiated. Ask before you sign.
There’s no wills register in South Africa
There’s no central database of wills here, and no way to lodge one with the Master before death. Nothing goes looking for your will. Somebody has to already know where it is.
Which makes the cheapest and most effective step also the least technical: give your nominated executor a copy clearly marked COPY, and tell your family where the original lives and who holds it.
What should sit alongside the will
Your will shouldn’t contain passwords or crypto seed phrases, because once it’s lodged with the Master it becomes part of the estate record. But the executor still needs the practical detail: which firm holds the original, policy numbers, bank and investment accounts, and access details for online accounts.
This is the part people mean by digital estate planning, and it’s what a Legacy Binder is for. The will says who gets what. The binder is the record of what exists, where it sits, and how to reach it.
Crypto deserves its own line. SARS treats a crypto asset as a movable asset in a deceased estate, valued at the date of death, so it forms part of the estate whether or not anyone can reach it. Without the keys, it stays unreachable permanently. Al Baraka Bank’s estate guidance makes the general point plainly: keeping a running inventory of assets, liabilities and accounts makes an executor’s job dramatically easier.
Where an encrypted vault fits
The paper original needs a safe physical home. The information about it needs somewhere encrypted and easy to reach from a phone. That second half is what Vaultneur is: an encrypted digital vault for the records an executor ends up hunting for.
Records are encrypted on your device before they go anywhere. Every file gets its own AES-256-GCM key, wrapped by a key derived from your passphrase, and the keys sit in the iOS Keychain or Android Keystore behind Face ID or your fingerprint. Vaultneur holds no key that can decrypt your vault, so we can’t read what’s inside it, and we’d have nothing readable to hand over if we were ordered to. Record types cover ID, Medical, Financial, Crypto Wallet and Login.
One limitation you should hear from us rather than discover later: there is no password reset. Forget your passphrase and the vault is unrecoverable by anyone, us included. Write the passphrase down and keep it somewhere secure that the person who’d need it can actually reach. Not inside the will, for the same reason as the passwords above.
Four things worth doing this week
- Confirm you know where the original is, and that it’s still there
- Check that the person who’d have to find it knows too
- Give your executor a copy marked COPY
- Write down the asset list, including anything digital
None of this is legal advice, and estates get complicated quickly where a trust or a business is involved. Speak to an admitted attorney or an accredited fiduciary practitioner before making any binding decision about your will or your estate.