Succession Act 1965 section 5

Presumption of simultaneous death in cases of uncertainty

Section 5 establishes the rule that applies when two or more people die in circumstances where it is impossible to determine who died first, and sets out how their property is to be distributed.

• Where two or more persons die and it is uncertain who survived whom, they are all deemed to have died at the same time for the purposes of distributing their estates.
• If those persons held property as joint tenants immediately before their deaths, the joint tenancy is converted into a tenancy in common in equal shares.
• Each person's equal share of formerly jointly held property then forms part of their individual estate and is distributed accordingly.
• This rule removes the previous uncertainty where there was no legal presumption about the order of death, which caused particular difficulty where the deceased were husband and wife.