Getting Married No Longer Cancels Your Will in Ontario — What That Means for the House in Your Parent’s Old Will

For the adult children named in that will: the document now survives the wedding. Whether the house does depends on how it was lived in and how the title is held.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a broker with AZ Real Estate Partners at Bay Street Group Inc., Brokerage. This one is written for a particular reader: the grown child of a parent who has remarried. Somewhere there is a will your parent signed before the new marriage, and it leaves the house to you and your siblings. You may have heard that a wedding wipes out an earlier will. In Ontario that stopped being true on January 1, 2022. So the paper probably still stands. What it does not settle is how much of the house actually reaches you, because the new spouse has rights of their own under a different statute — and those rights land very differently depending on one thing the will never mentions: what the house was in your parent’s life. Below, the same will meets three different houses.

Before the three houses: two separate rules are at work

Rule one decides whether the will exists. According to the Succession Law Reform Act (as amended effective January 1, 2022), a will is revoked only by another valid will, a written declaration of revocation made with will formalities, or burning, tearing or otherwise destroying it with the intention of revoking. Marriage used to be on that list; the clause is now marked repealed. Section 17(1) adds that a will is not revoked on the theory that a change in circumstances implies an intention to revoke it.

Two things do still undo parts of a will, and both run against the spouse rather than the children. A divorce (judgment absolute) or annulment revokes gifts to the former spouse and their appointment as executor, and the will is read as if the former spouse had died first (s. 17(2)). Since 2022, the same applies if the couple were separated at death in the way s. 17(4) defines it.

Rule two decides how much of the estate the will controls. Under the Family Law Act, when a married person dies leaving a will, the surviving spouse must elect either to take what the will gives them or to take an equalization entitlement under s. 5 (s. 6(1)). The will itself is not changed by that choice — but the s. 5 entitlement ranks ahead of gifts in the will (s. 6(12)(a)). The house you were named for is one of those gifts.

What “equalization” measures — and why the house is in the middle of it

Each spouse has a net family property figure: what they own on the valuation date, minus their debts, minus what they already owned on the wedding day (net of debts then). On a death, the valuation date is the day before the death (FLA s. 4(1)). If your parent’s figure is larger than the surviving spouse’s, the survivor is entitled to one-half of the difference (s. 5(2)).

Two features matter for an heir. First, this is a comparison of two numbers, not a claim to half the house; the surviving spouse’s own assets and debts sit on the other side of the scale. Second, the wedding-day deduction has a carve-out written straight into the definition: it applies to “property, other than a matrimonial home.” That one phrase is why the three houses below come out differently.

House 1: bought before the wedding, then lived in as the couple’s home

According to the Family Law Act (s. 18(1)), any property a spouse has an interest in that is ordinarily occupied by the couple as their family residence is their matrimonial home. Title does not need to be in both names. A house your parent owned alone, years before the marriage, becomes a matrimonial home once the couple lives there as their home.

The consequence for the calculation: the house’s value on the wedding day cannot be deducted. Its full value on the valuation date counts in your parent’s net family property. Read plainly, the formula treats the whole house — not only what it gained during the marriage — as part of the pool being compared.

Three other provisions touch this house specifically:

• If the surviving spouse has no ownership interest but was living there at the death, they may stay against the estate rent-free for 60 days after the death (s. 26(2)).
• The estate cannot distribute anything — including transferring the house to you — within six months of the death unless the surviving spouse consents in writing or a court authorizes it (s. 6(14)).
• The matrimonial-home label is tied to the valuation date in the s. 4(1) definition. If the couple had moved out before the death, whether the house still carries that label is a question for a family or estates lawyer, not something to assume.

House 2: bought before the wedding, always rented out, never their home

If the couple never ordinarily occupied the property as their family residence, it does not meet the s. 18(1) test. It is ordinary property for net family property purposes, so its value on the wedding day is deductible under clause (b) of the definition, along with the other property your parent brought into the marriage.

What remains in the comparison is roughly the part of its value that arose during the marriage — my reading of how the formula works, not a figure the statute states. The surviving spouse also has no 60-day occupancy right here: s. 26(2) speaks only of a matrimonial home.

None of this means the rental is shielded. If the spouse elects equalization and the estate owes them money, that entitlement still ranks ahead of the gift of the rental to you. Whether the payment comes out of the rental, out of other assets, or by selling something is an estate-administration question the statute does not answer.

House 1 vs House 2 under the same will

House 3: on title with you as joint tenants

A parent may put an adult child on title as a joint tenant, expecting the house to pass to that child by right of survivorship and stay outside the will entirely. The Family Law Act has a rule aimed squarely at this arrangement when the property is a matrimonial home.

Section 26(1): if a spouse dies owning an interest in a matrimonial home as a joint tenant with a third person and not with the other spouse, the joint tenancy is deemed severed immediately before the death. You are the third person in that sentence.

The inference (mine, not the statute’s words): once severed, your parent’s share no longer passes to you automatically. It falls into the estate, where the will governs it — and where the spouse’s elected entitlement can rank ahead of the will. Your own share of the title is not touched by s. 26.

If the jointly held house was not the couple’s family residence — say your parent and the new spouse lived elsewhere — s. 26(1) by its wording does not apply, because it speaks only of a matrimonial home. Whether anything else about the transfer to you can be challenged is outside this article and needs an estates lawyer.

If the marriage happened before January 1, 2022

The old rule applied to those marriages: before 2022, Ontario law provided that marriage revoked an earlier will, subject to exceptions. A will that was revoked by a marriage under that rule is a separate problem from everything above.

The Legislation Act, 2006 (s. 51(1)) says repealing a provision does not affect its previous operation or rights that arose under it, and the Succession Law Reform Act (s. 19(1)) says a revoked will is revived only by a later will or codicil showing that intention, or by re-executing it with the required formalities. Read together, the inference is that a will already revoked by a pre-2022 marriage does not come back to life because the law changed. That is an inference from the statutes, not a ruling; whether an exception applied to a particular will is for an estates lawyer to check against the document.

What this article does not cover

• Partners who never married. The election and equalization above belong to a “spouse” as Part I of the Family Law Act defines it — two people married to each other (including a void or voidable marriage entered in good faith). A cohabiting partner who never married does not get the s. 5/s. 6 election. A partner who was financially dependent may have a separate support claim under Part V of the Succession Law Reform Act, which is its own topic.
• No will at all. If your parent died without a will, intestacy rules apply instead, also covered separately.
• What to change. Whether a will should be redone, or a marriage contract signed, is legal advice for your parent’s lawyer, not for a real estate article.