Most people who come to us have thought about their will. Far fewer have thought about their super, and almost nobody has thought about the two things together.

That is understandable. Superannuation feels like something that happens in the background, managed by a fund, arriving as a statement once a year. It does not feel like an asset in the way a house feels like an asset.

For a lot of Australian families it is the second largest thing they own, and once you add the life insurance that often sits inside it, the death benefit can be the single biggest payment a family ever receives. Which makes it worth knowing that your will, in most cases, does not control it.

Your will does not automatically control your super

A will deals with your estate. Your estate is made up of the assets you personally own at the date of your death: the house in your name, your bank accounts, your car, your shares.

Superannuation is different. Your super is held in a trust and administered by a trustee. You have a beneficial interest in it, and you do not own it outright in the way you own the things in your estate. When you die, the trustee decides what happens to the death benefit, applying the fund’s trust deed and superannuation law.

This is why a person can have a carefully drafted will, updated recently, saying exactly what they want, while the biggest single payment their family receives is decided by somebody in a fund’s claims team who has never met them. It is the clearest example I know of the real risk in estate planning. The risk is rarely a missing document. It is an incomplete structure, where the documents that exist do not reach the assets that matter.

What a binding death benefit nomination actually does

A death benefit nomination is how you speak to the trustee. There are two broad kinds, and the difference is not cosmetic.

A non-binding nomination is a statement of preference. The trustee will generally consider it, then form its own view about who should receive the benefit, often after asking questions about financial dependency and relationships. Families who disagree with the outcome can object, which is how disputes start.

A binding death benefit nomination, where it is valid and current, generally directs the trustee to pay the benefit as you have specified. It removes the discretion. That is its entire point, and it is also why the validity requirements are taken seriously: form, signature, witnessing and currency all matter, and a defect in any of them can render the nomination ineffective.

Regulator attention on this area has increased. ASIC released Report 831 on 10 June 2026, a follow-up review of how super trustees handle death benefit claims. It found real improvement in some funds, including a 53% reduction in internal complaints about delays between early 2024 and late 2025, alongside continuing failures elsewhere: claim volumes were up 10% in the twelve months to October 2025, and five of the ten trustees still under review had not identified a single systemic issue from their complaints data, and at least one had not analysed that data at all. ASIC has said it will consider its full range of regulatory tools, including enforcement action. ASIC Commissioner Simone Constant put it plainly: “There is no excuse for delays in delivering better outcomes for death benefit claimants.”

That pressure is welcome. It does not change the underlying position for your family. A clear, valid, current nomination is still the thing that gives a claim the best chance of moving quickly.

The three year clock, and who you can actually nominate

A binding nomination will commonly lapse three years after it is signed, unless your fund offers a non-lapsing version and you have made one. Sign one, change jobs twice, consolidate two accounts, and there is a fair chance the nomination you are relying on expired some time ago without anyone telling you in a way you noticed.

Some funds offer non-lapsing binding nominations, which do not expire on that cycle. Not every fund does, and the conditions differ. Self managed funds operate under their own deed, which may handle nominations quite differently again. This depends on your structure.

Then there is the question of who is eligible. Superannuation death benefits can generally only be paid to a dependant as superannuation law defines that term, or to your legal personal representative. A dependant broadly includes a spouse or de facto partner, a child of any age, a person in an interdependency relationship with you, or a person who was financially dependent on you.

A man I will call Wesley nominated his sister. He had no partner and no children, his sister had helped him through a long illness, and to him it was obvious. His fund could not act on it, because a sibling who is not financially dependent and not in an interdependency relationship generally falls outside the list. The same problem catches nominations to nieces and nephews, close friends, neighbours and often grandchildren.

Sending super to your estate, and then into a testamentary trust

There is a third option that gets overlooked. You can nominate your legal personal representative, which directs the death benefit into your estate, where it is then distributed under your will.

Doing that brings super inside the reach of your will, and that opens up everything a will can do. Where the will establishes a testamentary discretionary trust, the death benefit can flow into that trust rather than landing as a lump sum in a beneficiary’s personal account. Depending on how the trust is structured, that can offer flexibility in how income is distributed across a family group over time, and a degree of protection that a direct personal payment does not have.

It also has trade-offs, and they are real. Super paid to an estate can be taxed differently to super paid directly to a dependant, particularly where adult children are involved. Money in the estate is exposed to any family provision claim made against that estate. Estate administration takes longer than a direct fund payment.

One way a will can deal with the tax point is a superannuation proceeds trust, a narrower testamentary trust whose only beneficiaries are the people who could receive your super tax free, such as a spouse or children under 18. Without one, tax can be triggered simply because a wider trust includes people who would have paid it.

Which route suits a particular family depends on who the beneficiaries are, what the will already does, how the fund’s deed operates and what the tax position looks like. There is no single correct answer, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your circumstances is guessing. This is where tailored advice matters.

Free guide If you want to understand how a testamentary discretionary trust works in plain English before you make any decision about your super, our testamentary trust guide is a free download from the website.

✦ Download the free Testamentary Trust Guide

Start by knowing what actually exists

Before any of this becomes a legal question, it is an information question, and that part you can handle this week.

Most people cannot name every super account they hold. Fewer can say whether there is life insurance inside each one, what it is worth, or when they last looked at the nomination. If you cannot answer those questions while you are well, nobody will be able to answer them for you when you are not.

Sorted Life is our life and legacy organisation system, built to record exactly this: which funds you hold, what insurance sits inside them, where your nomination forms are filed, where your passwords are kept and where your legal documents live. It is not a substitute for advice. It is the thing that means the person handling your affairs starts with facts rather than a search.

✦ Start with Sorted Life

Where the real risk sits

If you take one thing from this, make it a small one. Log into your fund this week. Find the nomination, check whether it exists, whether it is binding, when you signed it and who is named on it.

If the answer is that you are not sure, you are in the same position as most Australians, and it is fixable. Where it becomes worth proper advice is when the answer interacts with the rest of your plan: a blended family, adult children, a business, a testamentary trust in the will, or a fund whose rules you have never read.

A Family Wealth Planning Session is an hour on Zoom with Jaime and Chandla, mapping your family, your assets and your goals, and designing the strategy before any documents are drafted. You leave with clarity either way.

✦ Book a Family Wealth Planning Session

This article is general information only and not legal advice. Estate planning laws differ across Australian states and territories. You should obtain legal advice specific to your circumstances before making decisions.