A genuinely recent addition, effective July 2024
New Hampshire's Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act, RSA Chapter 563-D, took effect July 1, 2024 — making New Hampshire one of the more recent states to adopt this kind of deed. It lets an owner record a deed naming a beneficiary who receives real property automatically at death, without probate.
A specific required title
The instrument must specifically bear the title "Transfer on Death Deed." This isn't just a suggestion for clarity — it's a specific naming requirement written directly into New Hampshire's deed execution statute, meaning a document that accomplishes the same substantive goal but uses different wording in its title risks not being treated as a valid TOD deed at all.
The dual 60-day deadline
Here's New Hampshire's most distinctive and strictest feature: the deed must be recorded at length in every county registry where the land lies, both before the transferor's death and within 60 days after it was executed. Both conditions genuinely have to be satisfied — missing either deadline makes the deed void. This is a considerably stricter recording requirement than many other states impose, where the only real deadline is simply recording sometime before death, with no fixed window tied to the signing date itself. An owner who signs a New Hampshire TOD deed and sets it aside for a few months before recording it may find, only after it's too late, that the 60-day window has already closed.
Revocation follows the same recording pattern
The deed remains revocable at any time, subject to possible contract remedies if the owner had made a separate, enforceable promise not to revoke it. Revocation requires recording, within 60 days and before death, a later TOD deed, an express revocation, or a deed that expressly revokes the earlier one. Physical cancellation of the document and a will both fail to revoke it. Where joint owners made the deed together, all of the living owners must join in any revocation.
Excluded from a surviving spouse's elective share
New Hampshire's statute includes a genuinely distinctive protection: property conveyed by a transfer on death deed is specifically excluded from the probate estate for purposes of calculating a surviving spouse's statutory elective share. In many states, a surviving spouse's elective-share calculation reaches beyond the probate estate into certain non-probate transfers, sometimes called an "augmented estate." New Hampshire's TOD deed statute specifically carves this kind of property out of that broader calculation, giving owners more certainty that their TOD deed beneficiary will actually receive what was intended, without that gift being reduced to satisfy a surviving spouse's elective-share claim.
Excluded from a pretermitted heir's share, too
The same statute extends a parallel protection to pretermitted heirs — typically a child accidentally omitted from a will, who might otherwise have a statutory claim to a share of the estate. Property conveyed by a transfer on death deed is also excluded from determining the share payable to a pretermitted heir of the transferor, further insulating the TOD deed gift from these particular statutory claims against the broader estate.
Default lapse rules for multiple beneficiaries
Where multiple beneficiaries are named, they take concurrent interests in equal and undivided shares with no rights of survivorship between them, unless the deed specifically creates a joint tenancy among the beneficiaries. If one beneficiary's share lapses or fails for any reason, it's transferred to the other beneficiaries in proportion to their respective interests, unless the deed provides otherwise.
Joint ownership still comes first
If the transferor is a joint owner survived by one or more other joint owners, the property belongs to those surviving owners with right of survivorship instead — the TOD deed only becomes effective if the transferor turns out to be the last surviving joint owner. See our guide to New Hampshire joint tenancy rules for how that underlying co-ownership question gets decided.