In effect since March 2013
The District of Columbia adopted the Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act through D.C. Law 19-230, effective March 19, 2013, codified at D.C. Code §§ 19-604.01 to 19-604.19. It lets an owner record a deed naming a beneficiary who receives real property automatically at death, without probate.
Simple execution, no witnesses
The owner signs and acknowledges a recordable deed — no separate witness is required — and records it with the Office of the Recorder of Deeds before death. The beneficiary doesn't need to sign the deed, accept it, or even know about it during the owner's lifetime for it to be valid.
Joint ownership still comes first
The Act specifically allows transfers to joint owners — meaning owners who hold property with a right of survivorship, whether as joint tenants or tenants by the entirety — but not tenants in common, who carry no survivorship right between them in the first place. If the owner holds the property jointly with survivorship, the property passes through that survivorship to the other joint owners first, before it ever reaches the named TOD beneficiaries. If one joint owner dies but is survived by other joint owners, the property simply passes to those surviving owners; the TOD deed becomes effective only once the last joint owner dies. A deed made by joint owners together is revoked only if all of the living joint owners revoke it.
A common planning pattern this enables
These rules make a genuinely common estate-planning goal straightforward in DC: a married couple, for example, can hold their home as tenants by the entirety and separately record a TOD deed naming their children as beneficiaries. The surviving spouse automatically receives the whole property first through the entirety's survivorship right; only once that surviving spouse has also died does the TOD deed take effect, passing the property on to the children without a probate proceeding at either step.
Beneficiary survival and lapse
If a named beneficiary dies before the owner, the transfer to that beneficiary lapses. Under the default rules, when a TOD deed names two or more beneficiaries and one of them lapses, that share is transferred to the other surviving beneficiary or beneficiaries on a pro rata basis. A beneficiary takes the property subject to all conveyances, encumbrances, mortgages, liens, and other interests it was subject to at the transferor's death, and without any warranty of title.
Creditor claims and Medicaid
During the owner's life, the deed doesn't affect either creditor rights or public-assistance eligibility. After death, if the probate assets can't cover allowed claims and statutory allowances, the beneficiary is liable up to the value of the property they received, with written demand required and a proceeding generally due within one year. There's no TOD-specific Medicaid immunity built into the statute — ordinary estate recovery principles can still reach TOD-deeded property under the same general rules that would apply to other assets.
The rules that decide survivorship in the first place
See our guide to DC joint tenancy rules for how the underlying co-ownership question actually gets decided, including a real, recent case showing how courts interpret a deed whose own language creates genuine ambiguity about which form of ownership was actually intended.