Estate planning sits where legal, financial, privacy and security questions meet, so we hold the statistics on this site to a stricter standard. This page documents the figures used most prominently — including every figure on our homepage and statistics page — with the exact claim, its definition, the source, the date, the method and the limitations.
Each figure carries one of four labels: survey result (what a sample said), estimate (a researcher’s inference), projection (a model of the future) or company policy (which can change). None of them is a guarantee about your own situation.
Statistics and sources
Survey result56% of U.S. adults have none of five core estate planning documents
| Claim as we state it | 56% of U.S. adults have no estate planning documents — no will, trust, medical power of attorney or advance directive, financial power of attorney, or HIPAA authorization. |
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| Definition | On this site, “no estate plan” always means none of those five document types. People who rely only on beneficiary designations or informal arrangements are counted in the 56% unless they also hold one of the five. |
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| Source | Trust & Will, “2026 Estate Planning Report: Key Findings and Trends” |
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| Published | March 26, 2026 (last updated June 29, 2026) |
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| Method | Random double-opt-in online survey of 5,000 U.S. adults, fielded January 28–February 5, 2026 by Talker Research for Trust & Will; 30 questions; stated margin of error about ±1.4 percentage points at 95% confidence. Responses are self-reported. |
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| Limitations | Commissioned by Trust & Will, a company that sells estate planning products and is an AfterMyPass affiliate partner. The publisher calls the survey “directional.” We have not seen the underlying data, only the published report. Year-over-year comparisons use a different 2025 survey (10,000 adults, January 2025), and the publisher advises caution with differences under 3 points. |
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| Used on | Homepage, statistics page, women’s guide, Gen X guide |
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Survey result48% of Americans have no instructions for their digital accounts
| Claim as we state it | 48% of Americans have no instructions in place for what should happen to their digital accounts and files when they die. |
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| Definition | “No instructions” means no written instructions, no account-level legacy controls (such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact or Google’s Inactive Account Manager) and no informal notes. Related figures: 21% have formal written instructions, 12% have account-level controls, 12% only informal arrangements; 23% of will-holders and 11% of trust-holders have no digital instructions. |
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| Source | Trust & Will, “2026 Estate Planning Report: Key Findings and Trends” (section “Digital Estate Planning — The Fastest-Growing Blind Spot”) |
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| Published | March 26, 2026 (last updated June 29, 2026) |
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| Method | Random double-opt-in online survey of 5,000 U.S. adults, fielded January 28–February 5, 2026 by Talker Research for Trust & Will; 30 questions; stated margin of error about ±1.4 percentage points at 95% confidence. Responses are self-reported. |
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| Limitations | Commissioned by Trust & Will, a company that sells estate planning products and is an AfterMyPass affiliate partner. The publisher calls the survey “directional.” We have not seen the underlying data, only the published report. Year-over-year comparisons use a different 2025 survey (10,000 adults, January 2025), and the publisher advises caution with differences under 3 points. |
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| Used on | Homepage, statistics page |
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Survey resultOther figures from the same report (Gen X, AI trust, family conversations)
| Figures | 62% of Gen X respondents have none of the five documents (Gen Z 54%, Millennials 58%, Baby Boomers 48%). 30% trust AI advice more than a human attorney for estate planning, up from 20% in 2025, while those who trust it less fell from 46% to 36%. 27% have never discussed end-of-life wishes with loved ones and do not plan to. |
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| Source | Trust & Will, “2026 Estate Planning Report: Key Findings and Trends” |
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| Method | Random double-opt-in online survey of 5,000 U.S. adults, fielded January 28–February 5, 2026 by Talker Research for Trust & Will; 30 questions; stated margin of error about ±1.4 percentage points at 95% confidence. Responses are self-reported. |
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| Limitations | Commissioned by Trust & Will, a company that sells estate planning products and is an AfterMyPass affiliate partner. The publisher calls the survey “directional.” We have not seen the underlying data, only the published report. Year-over-year comparisons use a different 2025 survey (10,000 adults, January 2025), and the publisher advises caution with differences under 3 points. |
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| Used on | Gen X guide, AI estate planning, starting the conversation, statistics page |
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EstimateRoughly 3–4 million Bitcoin are estimated to be permanently lost
| Claim as we state it | Estimates suggest roughly 3–4 million Bitcoin may be permanently lost. We do not publish a dollar value because it depends on a Bitcoin price that changes constantly. |
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| Sources | River, “How Much Bitcoin Is Gone Forever?” — 3–4 million coins, 14–19% of the 21 million total supply (published September 2023). Chainalysis (2017 analysis) — 2.78–3.79 million coins, reported by outlets including Cointelegraph. We could not retrieve the original Chainalysis report, so we cite it through press coverage. |
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| Method | Both estimates infer “lost” coins largely from coins that have not moved for long periods, plus assumptions about owner behavior. Neither is a count, and we have not independently reproduced either analysis. |
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| Limitations | Estimates are old (2017 and 2023), differ from each other, and rest on assumptions that can be wrong — coins that look lost can move again. The Chainalysis estimate included roughly one million coins attributed to Bitcoin’s creator that are assumed lost. No source separates losses caused by an owner’s death from lost keys, forgotten passwords and user error, so we do not claim death is the main cause. River sells Bitcoin custody and inheritance-related features. |
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| Used on | Homepage, crypto inheritance, Bitcoin inheritance, statistics page |
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ProjectionAt least 1.4 billion Facebook users projected to die by 2100
| Claim as we state it | In the lower-growth scenario of a 2019 Oxford Internet Institute study, at least 1.4 billion Facebook users would die by 2100; the study’s higher-growth scenario projects up to 4.9 billion. |
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| Source | Öhman & Watson, “Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online,” Big Data & Society (2019), Oxford Internet Institute. We cite it through press coverage, for example UPI (April 29, 2019); we have not re-read the paper itself. |
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| Method | Scenario modelling starting from 2018 Facebook user numbers, under different assumptions about whether new users keep joining. |
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| Limitations | A projection, not a prediction. It covers Facebook only, not “social accounts” generally, and depends on assumptions about growth that may not hold. It is seven years old. |
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| Used on | Homepage, statistics page |
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Company policyGoogle may delete personal accounts inactive for two years
Dated studyAbout 800,000 deceased Americans’ identities targeted each year (2012)
| Claim as we state it | A 2012 ID Analytics study found about 800,000 deceased Americans’ identities were deliberately targeted in a year, plus roughly 1.6 million applications that used a deceased person’s Social Security number apparently by coincidence — “nearly 2.5 million” combined. |
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| Source | ID Analytics press release, “Identities of Nearly 2.5 Million Deceased Americans Misused Each Year” (April 23, 2012) |
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| Method | The company compared credit applications from the first quarter of 2011 against Social Security Administration death records. |
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| Limitations | The data is about 15 years old and the study was run by a fraud-prevention vendor. The headline “2.5 million” combines deliberate fraud with accidental matches; only the smaller figure reflects deliberate targeting, which is the one we use. |
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| Used on | Identity theft of the deceased, homepage |
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Corrections log
We would rather correct visibly than quietly. Changes made to statistics on this site:
- October 2026 — removed “Trusted by 10,000+ families.” We could not substantiate the figure.
- October 2026 — replaced the “$140 billion in lost Bitcoin” figure with coin-count estimates and their sources. The dollar figure depended on a price that had changed and had no traceable source. We also removed the claim that lost Bitcoin is lost mainly because owners died; no source supports it.
- October 2026 — removed “3.5 billion social accounts will outlive owners.” We could not find a source. We now cite the Oxford Internet Institute’s Facebook projection instead.
- October 2026 — corrected “2.5 million deceased Americans targeted yearly.” The source reports about 800,000 deliberately targeted, and its data is from 2011.
- October 2026 — corrected how we describe the Trust & Will survey. It is an online survey of 5,000 adults, not described by its publisher as “nationally representative,” and “no estate plan” means none of five listed documents. We removed an incorrect statement that 44% “have taken action” (44% say planning is “very important”) and a claim that the AI-trust shift was the fastest the survey had measured.
- October 2026 — rebuilt the statistics page. It previously stated that every figure was sourced and dated. Many were not, so we removed all figures we could not trace, including platform request volumes, a fraud-growth percentage, a crypto-market projection, cleanup-time estimates and several survey figures with no identifiable source.
- October 2026 — removed “∞ subscriptions billing after death” (not a statistic) and softened absolute legal and platform statements on the homepage.
If you spot a figure on the site without a source, tell us or email info@aftermypass.com and we will source it or remove it.
Editorial standards
- Statistics are labelled as survey results, estimates, projections or company policies, and we say who produced them and when.
- We link to the original source where we could retrieve it, and say so when we could not.
- We note when a source has a commercial interest in the finding.
- We do not quote dollar values that depend on a fluctuating price without dating them.
Legal review status
AfterMyPass is an educational site, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Our articles are written by our editorial team from primary and secondary sources and have not been individually reviewed by a licensed attorney. Laws on digital assets, wills, probate and platform access vary by state and change. If an article is ever reviewed by an attorney, it will say so, naming the reviewer, their jurisdiction and the date. Until then, treat legal statements as starting points to confirm with a licensed attorney in your state.
Affiliate relationships and conflicts of interest
We may earn a commission if you buy through some links on this site, for example estate planning services such as LegalZoom or Trust & Will. This does not change which statistics we publish or how we describe them. Note that several figures above come from a survey commissioned by Trust & Will, a company that sells estate planning products and that we have an affiliate relationship with; we cite it because it is recent, discloses its method and is one of the few national surveys covering digital instructions. See also our disclaimer.