The oldest members of Generation X are entering their 60s. Nearly two-thirds of them have no will, no trust, no power of attorney, nothing on paper to protect their families when they die or become incapacitated. A generation that weathered dot-com busts, housing crashes, and a pandemic is now staring down retirement with the worst estate-planning record of any living cohort.
That is the central finding of Trust & Will's 2026 Estate Planning Report, detailed by USA TODAY. Based on surveys of 5,000 adults conducted in January and February, the report labels Gen X the "least protected" generation in America. Sixty-two percent have zero estate-planning documents, no will, no trust, no medical or financial power of attorney, no HIPAA authorization form.
That figure is worse than every other generation the report measured. Baby Boomers, older and presumably closer to needing these documents, came in at 48 percent without any estate plan. Millennials registered 58 percent. Even Gen Z, the youngest adults in the survey, posted a lower rate of unpreparedness at 54 percent.
Cody Barbo, CEO of Trust & Will, put it bluntly. Gen Xers, he said, are "very much on the fence."
"They need education; they need awareness; they need an incentive."
Barbo described Gen Xers as "old-school in some ways," a cohort that still prefers to hire an attorney for estate planning rather than use an online service. That preference runs into a practical wall: there are not enough estate-planning attorneys to go around. "They still prefer to go the attorney route, which is not a bad thing," Barbo said. "But there's a shortage of estate-planning attorneys."
Younger generations, by contrast, are what Barbo called "digital natives", more comfortable handling estate planning through online platforms. The National Council on Aging notes that an online estate-planning service can generate a will for roughly $100 to $150. For Gen Xers who cite cost as a barrier, that gap between preference and reality is a problem they have chosen not to solve.
The broader numbers are grim across the board. Only 26 percent of Americans have a will. Only 14 percent have a trust. More than half of all adults, 56 percent, have no estate-planning documents at all.
The estate-planning deficit does not exist in a vacuum. Gen X faces a retirement savings crisis that makes the absence of wills and trusts even more consequential. The New York Post reported that Schroders' 2023 U.S. Retirement Survey found Gen Xers say they need just over $1.1 million to retire comfortably but expect to have only about $660,000 saved by age 67, a gap of nearly half a million dollars.
For many, even that diminished expectation is optimistic. A National Institute on Retirement Security report found the typical Gen X household has only $40,000 set aside for retirement. Only 14 percent of Gen Xers have a pension plan, and roughly half participate in any retirement plan through their employer.
Dan Doonan of the National Institute on Retirement Security said, "The American dream of retirement is going to be a nightmare for too many Gen Xers." His colleague Tyler Bond pointed to the structural causes, no pensions, repeated economic crises, wages that have not kept pace with inflation, and costs that keep climbing.
When a generation has modest assets and no plan for distributing them, the consequences fall on the families left behind. That is the practical cost of inaction, and it is a cost borne not by the person who failed to plan but by the spouse, the children, and the aging parents who must navigate the aftermath.
For those watching broader wealth trends, the contrast is sharp. Nearly 24 million Americans now hold a seven-figure net worth, yet the majority of working-age adults have done nothing to protect whatever wealth they do possess.
When someone dies without a will, local courts step in. The legal term is intestacy, and it means a judge, not the deceased, decides who gets what. Assets pass according to state law, not family wishes. The process is slower, more expensive, and often more painful than a simple will would have been.
A trust offers even more protection. Assets held in a trust generally pass to beneficiaries without going through probate court at all, avoiding both the delays and the public exposure of probate proceedings. For families with modest estates, that efficiency can be the difference between an orderly transfer and months of legal limbo.
The wealthy have long understood this. Estate-planning strategies used by high-net-worth families are built around trusts, tax optimization, and structured transfers, tools that are not exclusive to the rich but are overwhelmingly used by them. The gap is not just about money. It is about awareness and follow-through.
Jessica Johnston, senior director of the Center for Economic Well-Being at the National Council on Aging, made the point simply when she spoke to USA TODAY in 2024:
"Any will is better than no will. If your barrier to entry is cost associated with hiring an estate attorney, then using one of these tools is a better option than having no will at all."
There was a moment when the numbers moved in the right direction. Researchers saw a spike in estate planning at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Facing real mortality risk for the first time in decades, Americans rushed to get their affairs in order. But the trend reversed as soon as the pandemic passed. The urgency evaporated.
Barbo suggested that for many Gen Xers, "the reality hasn't hit yet." Death, he implied, is still an abstraction, even for people now entering their 60s. The death of a loved one, he noted, often triggers the estate-planning conversations that should have happened years earlier.
The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has tracked the broader pattern: the share of older Americans writing wills has been trending downward for years. This is not a new problem. It is a worsening one.
Meanwhile, financial pressures on near-retirees are mounting from directions they cannot control. Institutional pension systems are under strain, and the promise of guaranteed retirement income that earlier generations relied on has largely disappeared for Gen X workers.
There is a cultural dimension to this failure that deserves honest acknowledgment. Americans are surrounded by financial tools, online platforms, and low-cost legal services that previous generations could not have imagined. A will can be drafted online for the cost of a decent dinner out. A power of attorney form is not a luxury item. These are basic acts of adult responsibility.
Yet 56 percent of American adults have done none of it. Gen X, the generation that should know better, having watched their own parents age and die, leads the pack in avoidance.
Part of the problem is structural. The shortage of estate-planning attorneys that Barbo identified is real. So is the financial squeeze that leaves families feeling they cannot afford one more expense. And for those watching how tax policy and state-level regulations shape financial decisions, the choices high earners make to protect their assets only highlight how much more vulnerable ordinary families are when they do nothing at all.
But structure is not destiny. A generation that figured out 401(k)s, IRAs, and online banking can figure out a will. The tools exist. The information is free. The cost is modest. What is missing is the will, in both senses of the word.
Gen X was called the "latchkey generation", kids who let themselves in after school because both parents worked. They learned self-reliance early. They built careers through recessions and technological upheaval. They adapted.
Now they face the most predictable challenge of adult life, the need to plan for death and incapacity, and the data shows most of them have not adapted at all. The 2026 Estate Planning Report from Trust & Will surveyed 5,000 adults and found a generation that is, by the numbers, less prepared than people twenty years younger.
No government program fixes this. No policy proposal changes it. This is a matter of individual action, the kind of quiet, unglamorous responsibility that used to define what it meant to be a grown-up.
Gen X has the tools, the information, and the time, for now. What they lack is urgency. And urgency, once it arrives uninvited, tends to arrive too late.