Estate Planning Recodification
SB 100 is a broad recodification and technical cleanup bill for Utah’s estate-planning and fiduciary statutes. It reorganizes and updates cross-references across the Utah Uniform Probate Code, the Utah Uniform Trust Code, and the Uniform Directed Trust Act, including moving the trust code into new Title 75B and aligning related provisions in other titles. The bill also updates definitions, clarifies effective-date language, and makes conforming changes throughout the probate, trust, guardianship, conservatorship, health-care decisions, tax, cemetery, funeral services, and digital assets statutes.
Substantively, the bill preserves existing law while modernizing statutory structure and terminology. It amends provisions governing wills, estates, personal representatives, guardians, conservators, trust administration, trustee powers and duties, spendthrift and discretionary trusts, revocable trusts, asset protection trusts, directed trusts, and related notice, venue, and limitation rules. It also includes coordination clauses to avoid conflicts with other 2025 legislation affecting health-care decisions and guardianship/supported decision-making provisions.
The bill’s main legal effect is to renumber and recodify large portions of Utah’s trust and probate law into Title 75B, while updating cross-references in other titles to match the new structure. It does not appropriate money and is framed as technical and conforming rather than a policy overhaul, but it touches many statutes that govern estate administration, fiduciary conduct, trust creation and modification, creditor claims, Medicaid recovery, and related court procedures. Trustees, personal representatives, conservators, guardians, beneficiaries, creditors, and financial institutions are the primary affected parties.
The bill appears to have been broadly supported and noncontroversial. It passed the Senate committee, the full Senate, the House committee, and the House floor unanimously, and the Senate later concurred with a House amendment by a wide margin. The voting history suggests strong bipartisan agreement that the recodification and cleanup were needed and appropriate.
No major substantive opposition is reflected in the available materials. The only notable issues identified in the bill text are coordination clauses designed to prevent conflicts with other bills, especially legislation affecting health-care decisions and guardianship/supported decision-making agreements. Those clauses suggest the main concern was technical consistency across overlapping reforms rather than disagreement over the bill’s core purpose.