Multiple Wills in Ontario: They Shrink Probate Tax on Your Business — Not on the House You Own Outright

A primary/secondary will can keep private-company shares out of probate and save roughly 1.5% in Estate Administration Tax — but land registered in your sole name usually still has to go through it.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a Broker with 12 years full-time in the GTA market. Here’s a quirk of Ontario estate planning that catches people off guard: a good estates lawyer, before drafting a thing, will often ask whether you own a private company — because that one answer largely decides whether a second will can save your family real money. Two separate wills for a single living person sounds like a filing mistake, or a loophole. It’s neither: it’s a deliberate, court-tested way to keep certain assets out of probate and out of the Estate Administration Tax. The catch — and the reason a real estate broker is the one writing this — is which assets it works on. The house you own in your own name usually isn’t one of them, even though that’s the very thing most people hope it will protect. Below I’ll walk through what the tax actually costs, what a second will really shelters, why your home generally isn’t on that list, and what the real levers for the house are — with the standing caveat that this is education, not legal or tax advice, and any will has to be drafted by an Ontario estates lawyer.

What multiple wills were actually built to do

The multiple-wills strategy was invented for private business owners and incorporated professionals, not homeowners. Picture a dentist who owns a professional corporation, or a founder whose company shares are worth $2 million. Those shares can pass to heirs without anyone — no registry, no transfer agent — demanding an estate certificate. So why hand the province 1.5% of that $2 million just to prove authority you don’t legally need to prove?

That’s the whole idea: put assets that don’t need probate into a separate will, and never submit that will for a certificate. The technique is court-approved in Ontario — Granovsky Estate v. Ontario (1998) is the leading case. Notice what’s on the sheltered list, though: shares, shareholder loans, private interests. A house, generally, is not.

The Estate Administration Tax math, in plain numbers

Before the strategy, the cost it’s fighting. Ontario’s Estate Administration Tax (the old “probate fee”) works like this (source: Government of Ontario, verified 2026-07-31):

Probate-required assets vs. secondary-will assets

Why the house can’t just ride in the secondary will

People assume that “writing the house into the secondary will” dodges the tax. It doesn’t, for one reason: to transfer title in Ontario’s Land Titles system, the registry needs proof of authority, and that proof is normally the estate certificate (formally a Certificate of Appointment of Estate Trustee). Without it, the registry generally won’t take the deceased owner’s name off title.

There is one exception worth knowing: the first dealings exemption. If the property was auto-converted from the old Registry system into Land Titles and has had no transfer since that conversion — flagged LTCQ (Land Titles Conversion Qualified) on the parcel register — the first transfer after death may sometimes be registered on the will alone, no certificate required.

But it’s narrow and brittle: any transfer since conversion (even adding a spouse to title) kills it, and whether it applies has to be checked property-by-property by a lawyer reading the register. It has nothing to do with multiple wills — don’t assume your home qualifies.

If it’s the house you want to protect, here are the real levers

Since a secondary will won’t shelter the home, cutting the probate tax on real estate means one of these paths — each with a real cost, each worth pricing with a lawyer and accountant first:

• Joint tenancy with right of survivorship. Title passes to the survivor outside the estate. But you lose sole control, the home is exposed to the co-owner’s creditors and any marital breakdown, and adding an adult child as joint owner is a gratuitous transfer that triggers the presumption of resulting trust from Pecore v. Pecore (2007 SCC 17): the law presumes the child holds it in trust for you unless there’s evidence you meant an outright gift — so the interest can fall back into the estate anyway, and it invites litigation.

• Hold the property in a corporation. Then what passes are the shares (which can go in a secondary will), not the land. But moving property into a company triggers land transfer tax, forfeits the principal-residence capital-gains exemption, and adds annual corporate costs — usually only sensible for investment property.

• Beneficiary designations don’t work on real estate. RRSPs, RRIFs, TFSAs and life insurance can name a beneficiary and skip the estate; a house can’t be “designated” the same way. That’s one of the most common misconceptions I hear.

None of these is a free lunch. Chase the wrong one and the trouble you create can dwarf the tax you save.